WALK, HE SAID

Understandably, there isn’t a huge amount of walking in the movie Drive, which I just watched.  Ryan Gosling (as Driver) does a certain amount of strutting, and there’s a moment when his character asks the Cary Mulligan character (Irene) “Can I walk with you?’ but all they do is stroll along a corridor in their apartment building. This is not much of a movie for fans of pedestrianism.

But what really intrigued me about the movie were opening words, Driver’s voice over, “There's a hundred-thousand streets in this city. You don't need to know the route. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own. Do you understand?’

Leaving aside the question of whether this actually makes any sense, either inside or outside the movie, I’m still curious about the notion that “this city” (and it’s definitely Los Angeles that we’re in), has 100,000 streets.  It seems a ridiculously high and inaccurate number, but trying to find out how many streets there are in LA is surprisingly tricky.

It’s not so hard to find out how many miles of road there are: 6,500 in the city of Los Angeles, 20,000 in L.A. County: both those figures exclude freeways. Clearly there’s not much correlation between number of miles and number of streets.  The longest street in Los Angeles is Sepulveda Boulevard - 26.4 miles in the city, and the shortest street is Powers Place, 
which according to sources runs for just 13 feet, in downtown, close to Pico Boulevard, but looking at in on Google Streetview it hardly seems to exist at all.

 I found all this info online, so don’t shoot me if it’s not gospel.   And in any case it doesn’t answer the question of how many streets there are in LA.  So I went  to my Thomas Guide, Los Angeles County, and turned to the street index at the back.  Not having an intern, I haven’t got a count of every one.  But the index runs to about 100 pages and each page has about 400 street names, which makes (very roughly) 40,000 streets, which is again way, way below The Driver’s estimate, and again this is county rather than city.

6,500 miles is certainly walkable, given enough time, endurance and a willingness to go places where you’re not very welcome, and the figure is obviously of interest to a man who wrote Bleeding London, a novel and now a photo project about walking every street in London.  Current estimates for London (ie the number of entries in the standard A to Z) are for 70,000 streets which let’s face it is plenty.

“The Knowledge” as required by drivers of London black cabs involves knowing 320 routes along 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross, but a six mile radius from Charing Cross really doesn’t take you very far.

It must all have been easier for Patrick Hamilton’s author of “20,000 Streets Under the Sky” – a trilogy written between 1929 and 1934, when London was very considerably smaller.   It made for a great British TV mini-series. Hamilton and his characters were walkers.  The hero is infatuated with a prostitute, and what he wants above all is to go walking with her.

“He informed himself that he was not insanely anxious to get her on this walk because he was in any way in love with her. It was simply because he had to find out whether he was or not – to see where he was.”  

Lost, I think, is the simple answer.