The Getty

Is a nice place to spend the day in LA. Easy to get to by bus for us, and once there, time flies. For more photos, a Flickr set of Getty photos.

Two fatal accidents in my neighbourhood in West LA this week, one just a few hours ago up my street, and both persons who died were pedestrains.

The first happened on the day P and I were walking along Santa Monica Blvd to catch a bus to the airport; I was going to meet my parents at LAX. Spotting a plume of black smoke further up our side of the road, we crossed a block in advance to avoid being caught up in the crowd. Little did we know how serious the accident was until we walked past two totalled cars: one embedded in the shop front. The bus stop bench in front of the shop was no longer there. And as we walked on by, the emergency services were struggling to get through rush hour traffic to the accident. We only found out later that night that a young woman standing at the street corner was killed. The cause of the accident? An allegedly speeding car, weaving in and out of traffic down Barrington, crashing into a car waiting in the junction box to turn left. The driver of the speeding car was in a critical condition at the time of the late night news; we never found out if he/she survived nor why it was so imperative for this driver to speed along a residential road. We heard nothing more about the tragic death of the young woman, another victim of LA's small but lethal pool of crazy drivers.

Tongiht, the accident happened even closer to home. In fact, I witnessed a near-miss and a run-in earlier in the evening on Wilshire, but I digress. We were on an evening run with our neighbours' dog. Being a slightly misty/foggy evening, we decided to change his prescribed route (he's a dog of habit) and stick to our side of Santa Monica Blvd, given the events of three days ago and the notorious inability of LA drivers to cope with rain and fog. Which led us past the police block on the northern third of our small residential street. Being naturally suspicious foreigners, we thought some kind of shoot-out was in progress (really, we're just weird like that), but the reason for the block only became apparent later as we were flicking through the news channels. Catching the end of some local news, it became slowly apparent that a lethal hit-and-run accident involving a woman walking her dog had occurred earlier in the eveing. As reported on the news, the driver failed to stop, and a nearby resident was only alerted to the accident by the yelping of the dog.

I know this happens on a daily/hourly basis everywhere, but I can't help but wonder if the problem is particularly bad in LA, where due to the high volume of traffic, drivers feel harrassed and become too impatient to drive safely. We are too afraid to cycle on the road here: drivers have no idea how to deal with slow cyclists. I've also seen cars trying to overtake a bus at a street corner, only to turn right, cutting in front of a bus trying to pull away. Very often at a crosswalk in a residential area, I can stand and try to catch many drivers' eyes to get them to stop and let me cross the road (as stipulated in their highway code) for minutes before traffic calms down a little and I can dash across safely before the next lot of "I'm-so-important-I-need-to-get-to-work-right-now" drivers come by. And that's in daylight. On side streets.

Tonight, the fog can't have helped matters. Nor the chance that more drivers are slightly tipsy due to festive drinks. Nor the mad rush to buy last-minute presents or the equally mad rush to get home for a Christmas Eve dinner.

Whatever the reason, a woman out for an evening stroll with her dog won't be going home. And when she is identified, her family is going to have the worst Christmas ever.