La-La Land.

• Author: LEWIS, DAVID
• Position: Los Angeles, California

WE'RE GOING TO END UP LIKE L.A. ANYWAY, BUT NOT THAT WAY.

I vacationed in L.A. recently, a good experience. It's always good to see the future of the Front Range first-hand.

In addition to the Big Picture stuff, L.A.'S freeways, and the 'burbs attached to them, offered lots of little touches we can apply here in the Rocky Mountain Empire:

* Nice touch: string thick coils of barbed wire around highway signs. Graffiti? No prob.

* Get creative with electric billboards. My favorite, by a car dealership somewhere around Disneyland, read, "We speak 17 languages." Then it flashed what I guess was the same message in Arabic and what looked like Thai, Persian and perhaps Georgian. Then I drove by and missed the rest of it. Made me wish I'd been in a traffic jam -- just what we need around these parts.

* Speaking of which, I stayed for a few days in Alhambra, adjacent to Monterey Park. Lost most of the time, I got to know Monterey Park pretty well. Point of interest: All signs, other than municipal street signs and the like, were printed in both English and Chinese. It was kinda like being trapped in an art movie theater, watching Raise the Red Lantern or Drunken Master 3. If I could've found a parking spot, I would've checked out their bakeries. Also the huge Chinese supermarkets.

* I'm not sure how highways are constructed, but L.A. seems to have hit on a winning formula -- winning adherents to mass transit daily, I'm sure. Instead of highway segments constructed parallel to the wheels of your speeding vehicle -- whooosh -- they are built at right angles - bump-bump-bump-bump-bump. It's extremely annoying, fiendishly purposeful, or both.

So, SoCal has lots to teach us about where our state is headed. The SoCal transport success formula seems to be: take six lanes each way, add one traffic accident, back up traffic from Oxnard to Inglewood. Add five levels of freeway and six more lanes. Withstand 7-point earthquake. Repeat from beginning.

Which brings me to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Shortly after visiting L.A., I was invited to visit FEMA Region VIII's...