Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles is known the world over, but mainly for that very smart T-junction where Rodeo Drive ends across the road from the imposing Beverly Wilshire hotel – immortalised in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts.

But, like several other east-west LA arteries – Beverly, Sunset, Olympic, Pico, Melrose and Venice – Wilshire snakes all the way from Downtown to the coast. And in that near-20 miles it changes character several times, from the rundown Latino playground of McArthur Park to Santa Monica’s Brit-laden beach resort.

I like Wilshire. I use it a lot. Give or take the odd hold-up, it’s usually the easiest ride west, more interesting and less frenetic than the parallel 10 freeway.

I was driving back along Wilshire from a UCLA film show the other night when I was waiting at the lights by the Beverly Hilton hotel – Obama’s preferred LA base and the home of the Golden Globes.

In front of me was a gleaming, black, top-of-the-range BMW. While the lights were red the passenger door suddenly swung open. Out got a glamorous, pencil-slim brunette in a slightly tarty figure-hugging blue mummy dress and the obligatory high heels. With a scowl that would have put Cruella Deville to shame, she slammed the car door shut and waltzed through the parked traffic to the kerb.

The lights turned green. The male BMW driver moved off uncertainly from the middle to the inside lane before taking the next available right turn, presumably with the intention of doubling back to where his ex-passenger might be waiting – if he was lucky.

It was high drama, LA style.

Last Sunday I was heading in the opposite direction not far from there when I realised that the traffic had slowed significantly. For nearly all Wilshire’s length the speed limit is a comfortable 35 mph, which most drivers translate into a steady 40 or so. But we were doing not much more than half that.

I peered ahead, over the roofs of the cars in front, and saw a cyclist, helmeted and in full Tour de France gear, pedalling like fury – in the middle of the middle lane.

No one was hooting. Cars immediately behind took their opportunity to overtake, me included. I was tempted to hit the horn, but you can never be sure that you aren’t contravening some obscure traffic regulation so I restrained myself.

The next lights were red, the biker caught up with us and moved to the front, still in the middle lane. As the inside was free, I moved over there and trod on the gas as soon as we got the green. I checked my mirror and, sure enough, the strange procession resumed.

Was the cyclist trying to make a point? I’ll never know. But he was deliberately causing as much hassle as possible. A distinctively LA tableau.

The sights along Wilshire can be distracting. The LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) is only a couple of blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits, where mammoth skeletons were found.

In the fairly anonymous stretch known as mid-town, a huge aluminium bust of Lenin dominates a shopfront.

Further east is Koreatown, full of BBQ restaurants, travel agencies, yoga centres and Korean churches.

The south side suddenly opens out to reveal the site of the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Within minutes the drive east goes through Lafayette and McArthur parks, and upscale shops are replaced by a 99-cents store, a McDonald’s and a Home Depot.

Then I am dwarfed by the Downtown skyscrapers and it’s time to take a couple of left turns onto the slip road for the 110 freeway north to Pasadena – and home.

Last week, LA Live was alive with British voices calling out to one another on the way to a concert performance of The Who’s rock opera, Quadrophenia, by the band’s two aged survivors – Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend – and a string of younger backing players.

LA Live is the Los Angeles answer to London’s Leicester Square. In the midst of dowdy, neglected downtown, about 25 miles east of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice Beach and Malibu, speculators such as Philip Anschutz, owner of London’s O2 Arena, have poured billions of dollars into a gamble that they can revive the city’s historic heart with bright lights and top names.

I have laughed at Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard in the Nokia and, as well as the Who, the Staples Centre has held shows by Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. It is home to the Lakers and the Clippers, the local basketball rivals, and the Kings ice hockey team.

With typical west coast boosterism, LA Live calls itself “the most entertaining place on the planet”. That is a big claim, but ranged around LA Live’s square are 20 fast-food joints and coffee shops, anchored on the north side by the 7,000-seater Nokia Theatre and the Staples Center arena, about the size of Wembley Arena and hosting concerts, ice skating, boxing – anything that will attract about 20,000 spectators. The 14-screen Regal cinema and the ESPN West Coast Broadcast Centre add media glamour.

In the middle of the space, instead of Leicester Square’s trees, is a platform for open-air events or, at least, audience-participation games to keep the crowds amused.

LA Live is officially described as the premier destination for live entertainment in Downtown Los Angeles. That’s because it’s about the only live entertainment centre in Downtown, which has never fully recovered from the shock of its wealthy residents deserting it in the 1920s in favour of Beverly Hills.

One of the LA City Council’s main preoccupations is how to get it back to where it was, but it’s a slow process. As in New York, it’s quite edgy to live in a loft space there – if you’re a lawyer or accountant who likes to walk to work. But the real money stays west.

Like most US cities, LA has created a passable miniature imitation of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, with banks, rents and fancy restaurants to match.

But the LA Live square still seems oddly out of place, like a party in a nunnery. Duck under the nearby freeway and you are in a different world, almost a third-world country with rundown warehouses and car-repair lots.

But Anschutz and his business partners seem determined to pull the area up by its bootstraps. They have persuaded Mariott hotels to take a tower, a few floors of which have been designated a Ritz-Carlton. It doesn’t seem like the right surroundings for a five-star hotel – you wouldn’t want to walk your dog down some of the surrounding streets after dark – but the big sporting and showbiz events do pull in the money.

Quite a few surrounding businesses make a decent living on the back of LA Live. If you want to beat the official $25 parking fee for an evening, there are plenty of office multi-storey car parks willing to let visitors in for as little as $5 when the pen-pushers have driven home. And there are some reasonable Italian and Indian restaurants within walking distance.

The next item on the to-do list is to bring professional American football back to LA after the Raiders and the Rams quit because they could no longer fill the stadiums. But the National Football League, which controls where the pro teams are based, knows it can drive a hard bargain and is doing so.

Daltrey and Townshend sound more like a firm of lawyers than a rock band, and they were looking their age after an energetic two-hour set that earned that what in LA is regarded as a mandatory standing ovation. Staying seated to applaud is an insult.

Then we joined the crowds streaming out of the Staples, walked up the street to our cut-price parking space – $7 in our case, no expense spared – zipped onto the freeway and we were home in ten minutes.

One of the great myths about LA is that everyone has a pool. It’s really not true.

When I was house-hunting, we found about one place in four had a pool in the back garden – or back yard as they self-deprecatingly call the expanse behind the house, whether it is a muddy postage stamp or endless acres of manicured lawns patrolled 24/7 by menacing security guards.

Maybe all that means is that I wasn’t looking at the right houses, or ones that were expensive enough. I’m sure above a certain price a pool is as mandatory as a built-in BBQ (what? you don’t have one of those?).

But every so often I have come across a house accompanied by the archetypal LA pool – with jacuzzi, blue tiles, a white wall on one side, enough room for a dozen loungers on the other side, palm trees swaying gently in the breeze. And did I mention a baking sun?

Even better if you come across such an iconic scene when you have been invited to a party there – which I was the other day.

As in most parts of the world, urban hillsides bring out the inventive side of LA architects.

This gem, round the corner from Warner Bros. studios and overlooking (at a discreet distance) the 101 freeway, tumbled over at least six floors – to be honest I lost count.

It belongs to three bronzed middle-aged guys who have lived there nearly 30 years and gradually added bits here and there, and there. Work is still going on.

I was there as a guest of the singer and ukelele supremo Ian Whitcomb who, with his Bungalow Boys, was providing the entertainment with a string of 1920s and 1930s songs.

They performed on a fully-equipped stage, complete with professional lighting and one of those balls hanging from the ceiling that sends lights all round the room.

Spread out in front of them were half a dozen large tables covered in orange tablecloths, and beyond that a full bar. This was about five feet above the pool, so provided an ideal spot from which to dive bomb, drenching those trying to top up their tan on the loungers. Such fun.

Below pool level was a games room with its own loo (very important), four pinball machines and a window onto the pool, where a variety of whiteish limbs dangled in the blue water.

Indoors, next to a mirrored loo with two external doors, was a room filled by a triple bed. Paintings of naked bodies covered the walls. A staircase led down to the kitchen and an ornate dining room, reproduction 18th century furniture roughly 18th century.

I helped myself in the kitchen from steaming trays of vegetable stew, beef stroganoff, green salad and boiled rice. Amid the candelabras on the dining table were bowls heaped with bon-bons, to fill any corners that had been unaccountably neglected.

On the dining room terrace, a Latino family had camped and were talking animatedly among themselves in Mexican Spanish.

More stairs wound back down to the reception area, stocked with elaborately cushioned sofas, a genuine 1950s juke box, a plasma-screen television. And a lift.

There, by a wall, was a cage that looked as if it had been made for a very tall, thin parrot. Unclasp the door, step in and you feel as if you are encased in your very own gilded personal prison. I pressed the down button and waved goodbye, a little uncertainly, to my companions.

I descended to a gloomy storage area, chairs and tables piled higgledy-piggledy in the semi-darkness pierced only by a shaft of sunlight to remind me I was still in California.

I pressed the button again and found myself in a garage at street level, where a team of valets had been hired to park every guest’s car somewhere on the winding, cramped and already heavily parked streets.

They had their own portaloo (known in LA as portapotties) to keep them company as they sat in the sun smoking and trying to pass the time. I waved. They waved. I got back in the lift.

As if that weren’t enough floors, by the front door a temporary railway sloped upwards, taking a mobile pulpit up the incline to the highest level, where the owners were working on extending the property even further. On a terrace up there, a pig turned on the spit over a smoking fire while a helper carved slices and slipped them effortlessly between a couple of slices of sourdough bread.

As the afternoon wore into evening, the tanned brunette in the dazzling blue-and-white bikini stopped dive-bombing the pool and a contented haze of pot smoke settled over the party. The cars on the 101 zoomed by. Southern California was at ease with itself.

Sometimes it’s fun to be a tourist in LA – usually when a friend from London wants to be shown round – because it gives this rather pleased-with-itself city a new perspective.

Last week I found myself sitting in the back row of a packed 30-seater red single-deck TMZ bus, at a parking lot behind the Dolby Center (the renamed Kodak Theatre, thanks to digital cameras killing off Kodak, but it’s still where the annual Oscar ceremony takes place).

TMZ means nothing to most people living outside the US, but it is the best app, website (www.tmz.com) and daily TV show for west coast showbiz gossip and breaking stories.

Biggest scoop so far: Michael Jackson’s death. Cleverly, it is headed by a lawyer, Harvey Levin, who knows how to dodge most of the legal traps that go with celeb newsgathering but he is nevertheless irreverent and encourages his young team to take risks.

The name TMZ – pronounced tee-em-zee, no one would know what you were talking about in LA if you said tee-em-zed – is short for Thirty-Mile Zone.

This was originally a zone within which movie-makers didn’t have to pay extras for an overnight stay during filming, and it was measured from the site of the present Beverly Center, a slightly tatty 1980s shopping mall at the corner of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards. It must be the only mall which has a working oil well in its bowels. Just thought I’d throw in that piece of trivia.

Someone, either at TMZ or Starline Tours, had the bright idea of using the TMZ name to sell tours which are a bit different from the now-routine trudge round stars’ alleged homes. Instead, TMZ concentrates on celeb restaurants, night clubs and crime scenes, like where Hugh Grant had that notorious encounter with Divine Brown in a side street off Sunset Boulevard in 1995.

It was a baking hot, but while the bus had a roof it had no windows, so we got as much breeze as there was. Our guide was Luke, a budding actor and TMZ reporter who had an adapted iPhone to send stills and video back to the office… if anything noteworthy happened.

The bus was also equipped with two TV screens so, as we passed an innocent-looking restaurant frontage, he could bring the scene to life by kickstarting a clip of celebs coming out of the same place at night.

Luke was playing to a knowledgeable crowd who immediately recognised Dwight Howard, a tall black basketball player (is there any other kind?) standing on a Beverly Hills hotel balcony about eight floors up. Dwight waved, but resisted our pleas for him to come down and chat.

As we crawled along Rodeo Drive we saw a strangely painted yellow, black and very expensive-looking car parked outside Bijan, a men’s clothing and fragrance store.

Luke told us it belonged to the owner and was a $1.6m (£1.1 m) Ferrari Spider. Presumably Bijan did not mind tourists sprawling all over it to have their picture taken. I would.

The 90-minute $49 tour veered between Beverly Hills glitz and Hollywood sleaze, but it was up-to-the minute. We drove past the Beverly Hills courthouse where Lindsay Lohan has made so many appearances in recent years, as well as Osteria Mozza, one of the latest restaurant hotspots on Melrose.

And there were plenty of titbits to keep us amused. It had passed me by that the utterly vain and self-regarding residents of one of the snazziest districts in the US had organised a party on September 2, 2010, to celebrate the fact that their zipcode is 90210 – Americans put the month first in all-figure dates.

But I will always treasure the moment we stopped at the Comedy Store on Sunset Strip – home to Chris Rock, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and just about every comic you can think of. I managed to stop our guide in his tracks by yelling: “Hey Luke, I’ve played there!”

“You have?” he replied disbelievingly. “Who are you?”

“Bill Kay,” I said, as if he should have heard of me, “I played the Belly Room.” It was true. I had – for all of five minutes.

Maybe that distracted him enough to forget to tell us that right across the street was House of Blues, where the millionaire former record producer Phil Spector picked up the girl he was convicted of murdering.

Even TMZ isn’t perfect.

Of the many Bunker Hills in America – named after the 1775 War of Independence battle in Boston – I doubt if any generate more emotion than the one in downtown LA.

Nowadays it’s an ultra-functional concrete desert, home to theatres, concert halls, a hotel, civic buildings, offices and the sort of characterless blocks of flats you see everywhere from Manchester to Manchuria.

The district’s main developer, Prudent Beaudry, dreamed up the name to draw the wealthy to build mansions there more than a century ago. But they soon decamped west for the rural delights of Beverly Hills, leaving the grandiose buildings to be broken up into apartments that inevitably declined into scruffy flophouses for an itinerant population of Depression era n’er-do-wells.

Nearly all this was swept away in the 1960s, to the chagrin of conservationists who still rail at the synthetic modernization that replaced it.

This colourful history has been vividly and caringly recorded in a fascinating new history* by Jim Dawson, a West Virginian ex-marine who, like millions of others, came west and fell in love with LA.

He sees that history through the prism of film. Bunker Hill’s decline coincided with a boom in gritty realism a few miles away in Hollywood, giving filmmakers a heaven-sent clutch of locations and an exotic label – film noir.

The book lists 72 films featuring Bunker Hill, from Kiss Me Deadly to Cry Danger, from the classic M to the less celebrated Incredibly Strange People Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies!

Says Dawson: “If you want to see the original Bunker Hill, you’re out of luck unless you’re satisfied with two-dimensional representations: paintings, photos, postcards, a handful of novel and short stories and several dozen old movies and TV shows. That’s the only Bunker Hill worth visiting, if you ask me.”

Although the 1960s wrecking balls cut the top off the area, it is still hilly enough to justify keeping some of the old tunnels that are part of its has unique character.

There also used to be two funicular railways. One of those, Angel’s Flight, was dismantled rather than destroyed in 1969 and rebuilt 27 years later a hundred yards south of the original site. Dawson has chronicled that in a separate book.**

The transfer robbed Angel’s Flight – wrongly claimed by its operator to be the world’s smallest railway – of much of its early purpose and it has consequently become little more than a 50c-a-ride, five-minute tourist attraction that goes from street level to a bland plaza and back.

But visitors to downtown LA can still savour the noir era. Although Bunker Hill has been sanitised, Broadway, Skid Row, the diamond district, the Oviatt and Bradbury buildings, the Orpheum and Million-Dollar theatres and the hotels Biltmore and Figueroa have survived virtually unscathed and retain that sense of villainy lurking behind every corner.

Although there are parts of every city where you can get that shiver of danger, LA seems to have more than normal – maybe because of the steady flow of hopefuls that pour off every car, bus, train and plane every day.

When the hopes vanish, the temptation of a fast buck can lead the best-intentioned down a dark alley or two. Here’s looking at ya, kid.

* Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill, History Press $19.99, historypress.net.
** Los Angeles’s Angels Flight, Arcadia Publishing $19.99, www.arcadiapublishing.com.
Both available through www.amazon.com.

Buses and tubes are novelties to most people living in Los Angeles.

While the poorest have had no choice but to hang around bus stops for what hours on end in the hope of a ride, local politicians are spending billions of dollars trying to lure car-drivers onto public transport – or, as Angelenoes like to call it, transportation.

After all, why settle for two syllables when four will do?

Once upon a time, freeways were declared the answer to everything, nudged by the oil and car lobbies hell-bent on getting the public out of the trams that had served the city so well.

California’s very first, the Pasadena Freeway, bends and wiggles its way for ten miles out of downtown LA, built in 1940 before they grasped that straight roads are safer than curved. It can be a sobering experience, getting home late at night.

But now the freeways are becoming so clogged that LA has sent several deputations over to London to study the wonders of congestion charging. Of course, instead of charging a penalty for entering the zone at certain times, the LA version will be a fee for what will be called a premium expressway experience, or something of the sort.

But whenever the plan is floated, the social media is swamped with drivers pointing out the inconvenient fact that the main arteries are called, er, “free” ways and insisting that they stay that way.

So they have been diligently digging out an LA Metro system, but a glance at the map – bit.ly/KGR5Mt – shows that that is merely a skeleton of will be needed if it is to become anything like as comprehensive as the London Underground. Political exhaustion might set in long before that, or the local politicians might hare off in a completely different direction. Back to freeways, maybe.

If Antonio Villaraigosa, LA’s irrrepressible mayor, could be dropped down the London Tube for a week, he might feel less keen – even without the forthcoming Olympic Games.

When I planned to holiday in LA during the 1984 Olympics, I was told I was crazy.

Travel would be impossible, so would access to cinemas, restaurants, theme parks, you name it. But Angelenoes obediently obeyed the calls to get out of town, and others stayed away, so the place was virtually empty. Easiest US holiday I’ve ever had.

London in 2012 may not be so lucky. It is already creaking close to capacity before a single javelin has hit the turf.

My spies predict that Canary Wharf could be a major flashpoint. The crowds are usually several rows deep in the evening rush hour, but climb aboard quickly because the trains arrive from Stratford near-empty.

However, during the Olympics they will likely leave Stratford full, producing frustration at Canary Wharf.

So watch for Canary Wharf commuters to take the empty trains up to Stratford, then try and jump on at the terminus – which will move the flashpoint up the line.

Tube travel certainly sharpens the elbows for the relatively placid trips from Pasadena to LA’s picturesque Union Station.

The Jubilee Line extension has been a classic case of how a new train or bus service is initially acclaimed as a great advance, then cursed as the cause of yet more overcrowding. The Docklands Light Railway suffered the same fate. I predict Crossrail will fare no better.

There ain’t no justice in public transport – or transportation.

It is not widely known that Los Angeles has its own Broadway, but even in its 1930s heyday it was a very poor relation of New York’s.

Today only a few theatres remain in a street that has become largely taken over by Latino stores selling everything from baby rattles to electronics.

One survivor is the Orpheum, mainly because the interior has been so well restored that it earns millions of dollars hired out for TV shows and movies. American Idol has used it, and it features in the The Artist, winner of this year’s Best Picture Oscar.

Last weekend though, another idol commandeered it – ex-Python Eric Idle. And if you think that’s a terrible pun, wait till you see his show, What About Dick?

You probably will see it, in some form, because its four-night run was filmed – happily as a continuous show, without any pauses for retakes or any of the other irritating delays of normal filming.

Beforehand the local bars and restaurants were bursting with Brits, turning that piece of Broadway into Shaftesbury Avenue.

Brits take comedy very seriously, to an extent that people from other English-speaking countries – ok, Americans – don’t really grasp. I’m not boasting. It makes non-Brits think we’re weird. And we’re not, are we? No.

The night I went the house was packed for an at times dazzling exhibition by Britain’s top comedians and comedic actors: Russell Brand, Billy Connolly, Tim Curry, Eddie Izzard, Jane Leeves, Tracy Ullman and Idle himself. Hard to believe they weren’t being played by lookalikes but no, this was the real thing.

All the same, you can have too much talent. The stars were all busy congratulating and deferring to one another. Idle spent most of the time reclining in an armchair at one side of the stage as this magnificent talent competed to please him.

To save the stars having to learn their lines, the story was presented as a radio play so they could bring their scripts on stage.

According to its website, the show begins with the birth of the personal vibrator, “invented in Shagistan in 1898 by Deepak Obi Ben Kingsley (Eddie Izzard)”, and tells the story of “the subsequent decline of the British Empire as seen through the eyes of a piano.”

Self-indulgent? Just a little, and the groans flowed as the umpteenth dick pun lurched into view. Dick is on everyone’s lips. I can’t get enough Dick. Dick’s not up to it. And so on. Other jokes were simply ancient: “She opened the door in her pyjamas. Oh, I didn’t know she had a door in her pyjamas.” Boom, boom.

I reckon Tracy Ullman and Billy Connolly tied for the prize of acting everyone else off the stage.
Connolly had persuaded Idle to let him have several lengthy monologues in an impenetrable Scots accent topped off with a strong speech impediment.

Ullman went spiralling off on wonderful cockney solos. Jane Leeves sang sweet songs, playing the upper class innocent.

Tim Curry was a relentless gay vicar. Russell Brand and Eddie Izzard jumped from character to character, showing off their versatility.

On such an evening of British lavatory humour, it was fitting that during the show the guy in front of me released a ferociously pungent fart. I naturally outed him in a loud voice and vigorously flapping my programme. Alas he didn’t rise to the bait, but a great time was had by all.

As the shuttle train chugged up the hill overlooking the busy LA freeway in the afternoon sun, I couldn’t help thinking how different visiting the Getty Center was from a trip to London’s National Gallery.

The Getty, as it is known, was built 14 years ago at a cost of $1.3 billion of Paul Getty’s oil money.

To maintain the fiction that entry is free, underground parking costs from $10 for cars to $185 for coaches. But then that tram takes you to one of the planet’s most magnificent art galleries, made to withstand earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale.

Four marble-clad buildings frame a central plaza, and on the south side are terraces overlooking a truly stunning view of Los Angeles, from Downtown to the Pacific. To catch a little of the flavour, see the photo on the Wikipedia entry for the Getty Center.

But the Getty also demonstrates that, where high art is concerned, money can take you only so far. With a virtually unlimited budget, the galleries have a fair sprinkling of paintings and sculpture by major artists: Turner, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Rousseau, Millet, Millais.

However, they are in a small minority, summed up by the room carefully labelled Rembrandt and his Circle. Only three of the 17 works there are by Rembrandt.

You can have as much money as you like, but Europe’s galleries long ago grabbed the cream – and they are not selling.

Nevertheless, those three Rembrandts are three times as many as I counted ten years ago, so the Getty is slowly clawing its way up the ladder. In the meantime it borrows cleverly and mounts headline-grabbing temporary exhibitions like the Leonardo da Vinci one last year.

Where the Getty can spend money, it does so to great effect. Tucked away at the far end from the art galleries is the Harold Williamson Auditorium, a 450-seat cinema and lecture theatre that is the last word in comfort and uninterrupted views of the screen.

I was there last week for a 60th anniversary screening of High Noon, the classic Gary Cooper western.

If you go to the movies regularly in LA, you get used to personal appearances. A-listers like George Clooney make the rounds every February as the Oscars approach, and few months ago I saw Malcolm McDowell giving a jocular Q&A after a screening of A Clockwork Orange.

But when a movie is so old that the stars are no more, the organisers can usually persuade the children to turn up. After High Noon we had Tom Zinneman, son of director Fred Zinneman, and Gary Cooper’s daughter Marie.

She had lived the teenage dream of being able to wander freely round the set of a top movie, with a young James Dean apparently lurking to pick up acting tips from Cooper and the others.

If an audience is packed with film buffs, the LA etiquette is to burst into applause when the celebrity guests’ – or their parents’ – names appear in the title credits.

So it was noticeable that this time Cooper’s and Zinneman’s credits were greeted in silence. No insult intended. It simply indicated that many of my fellow cinemagoers were local residents from the nearby well-heeled districts of Westwood, Brentwood and Malibu, enjoying a free night out courtesy of the late Mr Getty.

On the way home the freeway was still gridlocked from a crash that had occurred miles up the road all of two hours earlier. Welcome to another of LA’s little traditions.