Explain To Me "Inflation" Again?

[MikeD]

Were you listening to those broadcasts in Phoenix? You spent some time doing traffic reporting from an airplane didn't you? I'd imagine studying up on what was happening in the bigger radio markets was probably smart. There might've been some smoke and mirrors back then. I'm not going to say who, where or any other identifying info but I might've worked in a hangar that might've also rented space to a news helicopter and sometimes when the June gloom set in it was not uncommon to walk by their office and hear helicopter noises and someone pretending to yell into a headset about a traffic jam 30 miles away, I'd look over the wall of the mezzanine and see the aircraft sitting on its pad in the hangar and just shake my head and continue on with whatever I was doing.

I used to listen to Bruce Wayne when I was in high school and would go out to California every so often in the summer. After he was killed in the plane crash at, I believe, Fullerton, Mike Nolan took over. When I later became a traffic pilot for KTAR radio in Phoenix, I’d listen to Nolan’s reports to get a feel for how they were done, but by the time I was flying the line, we had a reporter along with us. Ironically, I was hired, replacing the previous KTAR traffic pilot, Mike Kneutzman, who was killed when his R22 helo crashed into a house in north Phoenix, about 8 miles soutwest of Scottsdale airport, for reasons that were never really determined. All nearly 32 years ago.

 

[Rosstafari]

Name all of the greater LA freeways by their given name, from memory only.

Fun fact that you may already know, that’s where the SoCal definite article for freeways came from.

You wouldn’t call it “Santa Monica Freeway”, but “THE Santa Monica Freeway”. And so on. Since LA was something of a pioneer when it came to car culture and the heavy use of freeways connecting the sprawl, the names more or less preceded the numbering. Or at least widespread usage of numbers.

The numbers came later, and the article stuck.

 

[MikeD]

I think the fact that all of the freeways in SoCal have actual names is the reason why people historically didn't refer to a freeway numbers very often and if they did it would feel awkward to say it that way, everyone grew up referring to the Ventura freeway (101), the Foothill freeway (210), the Harbor freeway (110), the Golden State freeway (I-5) or any other freeway by their name and not their number. These days many folks don't even know the names of the freeways and refer to them by their numbers but they still use the old vernacular of "the". Sometimes it makes no sense, when the 118 was built it was named the Simi Valley-San Fernando freeway, that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue so everyone just referred to it as the 118, in '94 unbeknownst to almost everyone that didn't commute daily on it the name was changed to the Ronald Reagan freeway. Simi has always leaned a bit conservative with a higher than average percentage of first responders and other conservative folks so I'd suspect the majority of the folks commuting were not put off by the name change. The Ronald Reagan freeway, boy I'll bet that gets some people salty these days.

Fun fact that you may already know, that’s where the SoCal definite article for freeways came from.

You wouldn’t call it “Santa Monica Freeway”, but “THE Santa Monica Freeway”. And so on. Since LA was something of a pioneer when it came to car culture and the heavy use of freeways connecting the sprawl, the names more or less preceded the numbering. Or at least widespread usage of numbers.

The numbers came later, and the article stuck.

I never did know that; but that is a cool fun fact indeed. Love these neat tidbits of historical info!