🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2ofc8e$dh9@agate.berkeley.edu> chrchan@soda.berkeley.edu (Chris Chan) writes:
>One thing I notice about people in SoCal is that they
>often refer to the freeways by geography, as in the
>"Harbor Freeway", "Orange Crush", "San Bernadino
>Freeway", etc.  

Actually, "Orange Crush" refers to a specific stretch of freeway,
namely the segment of I-5 (Santa Ana Fwy) where it intersects the 
CA-22 (Garden Grove Fwy) and the CA-57 (Orange Fwy).  You have to have
driven thru this section a couple of times to appreciate the name
choice.  

This name and others like it ("The Stack," for the 101-110 interchange,
and "El Toro Y", for the 5-405 interchange, get coined by imaginative
traffic reporters and get popularized by the commuters.  (And picked
up by the mapmakers.  I have a 1984 Auto Club L.A Area Freeway System
map with the interchanges labeled with the alternate names.  Presumably, 
it's to help the non-locals decipher our shorthand traffic reports-
"we have a stalled vehicle in the number two lane, just north of the 
East LA Interchange.")

>I always thought this was done to throw off visitors, tourists, and 
>non-natives.

Or it could be a sideways comment on our love-hate relationship with 
the freeway?  I don't recall people giving pejorative names to freeways 
when I was living in Palo Alto and San Jose (well, maybe an exception in 
the case of the Embarcadero Freeway, but it's gone now).

For the record, I too use the shorthand ("the 405", etc), and only
prepend "highway" to a number when referring to a non-freeway that is
outside an urban area (thus "highway 2", for the Angeles Crest
Highway).

Art

--
 Art Nicolaysen                
 art@ipac.caltech.edu         
 Infrared Processing & Analysis Center, M/S 100-22
 Pasadena, CA  91125