On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I was driving from LAX to Palm Springs. Almost every freeway I drove on had five to eight lanes in each direction. Amazing! By comparison, I live in Portland, Oregon, where most of the freeways only have three lanes on each side.
I got to wondering, if you put all of Portland's freeways into L.A., how much of the L.A. freeway system would it actually fill up?
So, I decided to visualize this on a map.
Choose your city from the list below and see how it stacks up.
The metropolitan area has lane miles of freeway, which is of the freeways in LA.
Highway statistics for each city come from the US Federal Government.
For purposes of statistics, the federal government defines the LA metro area as Los Angeles and Orange Counties. This is the definition I used to build this site. Riverside-San Bernardino is considered a separate metro area.
Background photo by Thomas Hawk, licensed under Creative Commons.