LOS ANGELES -- When film producer Robert Greenwald grew weary of his daily two-hour commute seven years ago, he came up with a simple solution: He bought a building in Culver City and moved his office there.
That sliced his daily drive to 22 minutes, door-to-door. "I detest commuting," he says.
To anyone living elsewhere, Greenwald's solution might seem rash. But to those who live and drive in Los Angeles, Greenwald's action is testimony to the city's dependence on the automobile - and a demonstration of how Monday's quake struck at its soul.
Notwithstanding the death and destruction, the most widespread, enduring hardship created by the quake was the havoc it wreaked on this network of freeways.
From the east-west Santa Monica Freeway - known here as the nation's busiest - to the north-south Golden State Freeway, the earthquake severed highways where millions already spent much of their days.
Officials say it could be 18 months before the nine damaged freeways are fixed.
"It's just chaotic," says Robert Tom, 39, a driver for a film producer. "I keep trying new routes, but nothing's working. All the freeways are down, and the stoplights aren't working. It's a huge mess."
Roads were clogged in the San Fernando Valley's Newhall Pass, where Interstate 5 and state Route 14 were closed by collapses, forcing eight lanes of traffic onto a narrow surface street.
"The line starts here, and it's a long line. It's a mess," driver Alan Mendelson said.
The loss of a highway in any city is a major disruption, as residents of San Francisco learned in the 1989 earthquake. But unlike San Francisco, here there is no extensive public transportation system.
San Francisco didn't even bother rebuilding the elevated Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 earthquake left it useless.
Jay Boberg, president of IRS records, who lives in Manhattan Beach and commutes 45 minutes to Universal City, laughs when asked whether he could just switch to public transportation: "Impossible, impossible, impossible. It would probably take in excess of two hours."
Says screenwriter Gary Ross: "We don't have adequate rapid transit. It's not just a we-love-our-cars culture. We'd love a rapid transit system."
Since the early 1920s, when this city emerged as the city with the highest per-capita auto ownership, Los Angeles' fascination with cars has been the subject of sociological study and comedians' humor.
It was here that drive-in restaurants rose to prominence and car phones gained popular currency. The car has been a pillar of the culture since the streetcar system was dismantled in the 1940s.
On any given day, 6.6 million commuters spend an average 69 minutes in their cars. One in five spends almost two hours a day commuting, says Cheryl Collier of non-profit Commuter Transportation Services.
Now, the Highway Patrol says, a 90-minute commute from the Antelope Valley to downtown could take six hours.
Martin Wachs, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, says: "There's kind of a tendency to describe Los Angeles in terms of a love affair with the automobile. . . . In fact, it's quite a rational thing to depend on the automobile: It offers a higher level of efficiency and less cost than mass transit."
Los Angeles has begun in recent years to build what is so far a very limited mass rail system. Only 3% of people take buses. Those facts hint at what this city now faces.
"The tragedy is that the people who really use the freeways to work are the poor people," says novelist Marylouise Oates, former Los Angeles Times society writer. "The people in L.A. who are in the worst financial shape are going to have to bear the burden of these freeways collapsing. For rich people it's not a problem - they'll make another call from their car phone."
