There was still time to beat the worst of the afternoon rush, which seemed to be starting earlier and ending later with each passing year. It made me think of that new high-rise complex that would be going up before too long next to Chinatown, filling the railyards with business towers and packing more bodies and automobiles into the central city, while the deep pockets of the developers and their connections got deeper, and life for the rest of us got a little more miserable. Demographers were projecting that by the year 2025, the current population of California—thirty-two million—would have mushroomed to fifty million, analogous to absorbing the entire population of New York State, with most of the new arrivals crowding into already teeming Southern California. How they were all going to get around remained to be seen, and added an ominous new dimension to the term road rage, which was evident all around me now in the beep of horns, squeal of brakes, and a middle finger extended out the driver’s window next to me.
