Riding laptops to work

Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn and City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa are sure to break out some great rhetoric about reducing the city’s epic traffic jams as we lead up to their runoff sequel. We’ve heard it before. Every election, politicians promise to reduce traffic, which nevertheless gets worse. Lawmakers say if more of us would just get out of our cars, traffic wouldn’t be so bad. They’ve tried everything, they say, to pry us from our sport utility vehicles — from rail transit to “walkable” neighborhoods to car pooling, which is, itself, a partial concession to the car’s dominance. Yet nothing seems to work. In its share of work trips, transit continues to slide, as does walking, and despite the nation’s most extensive car-pool lanes system, car pooling continues to drop. But some good news has squeezed through the L.A. gridlock — telecommuting.