Yes, I was quoted in a front page story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Was it about Web 2.0? Knowledge management? Social media? How about “none of the above?”
Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt interviewed me for a story titled Growing Remote Areas See Fringe Benefits in Gov.’s Plan. The article discusses Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to improve California’s roads and infrastructure, particular in the inland regions around Los Angeles and other coastal communities.
Software specialist Jeff Hester has lived in Murrieta since 1989, before the town had a single stoplight. He’s watched his southwest Riverside County community mushroom from 44,000 in 2000 to 75,000 and growing.
Roads and freeways have gotten so congested that Hester and his wife must carefully choose when to dine out in nearby Temecula because traffic on the 215 and adjacent 15 is so snarled.
“Do we really want to travel across town [to make] what used to be a 10-minute, what will be a 35- to 40-minute drive?” Hester said. “The traffic on the freeway has gotten so bad now, the surface streets that connect the two cities have gotten so bad, you really have to think about … do we have time to fight the traffic, depending on what day of the week or what hour it is.”
Though he enjoys living in Murrieta, Hester — like many of his neighbors — works many miles away. Hester avoids the worst of commuter gridlock tying up the 91 and the 215 freeways, but he still spends about 90 minutes each way on the Ortega Highway, winding 53 miles through the mountains to his job in Orange County’s Aliso Viejo several days a week, when he’s not telecommuting.
“We could use some improvements in our infrastructure around here,” Hester said. Widening the 215 would “make a huge dent” in the traffic woes.
So what’s interesting about this? Well, apart from the truth of the story itself (the freeways around here were never meant to handle the traffic they currently carry), there’s the question — How did the LA TImes come to interview Jeff Hester? Which is precisely where this blog comes in.
Ms. Rosenbloom faced an impending editorial deadline. She had talked to the government officials and analysts. She needed to talk to a “normal person” living through the problem to share their personal experience. The solution? Search the Internet. Somehow a search for people who commute from Riverside County to Orange County brought up a link to my blog.
What I appreciated was the fact that the Los Angeles Times confirmed what I’ve been trying to tell my family for ages; I’m a “normal person.”
Nicole on the Windows Live Messenger team posted 
Apparently there has been some confusion caused by image cacheing. The Kubrick style that the blog has been modeling for a couple days uses an image of the famed director Stanley Kubrick, looking rather disturbed. I had swapped that out with one of my own, but in my laziness left the filename the same.