Oops... Poor Pull Out Makes for Traffic Tie-Up
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — A semi-truck departing the set for the upcoming film "Sympathy for Delicious" is causing headaches for Downtown drivers this morning. The truck was leaving a small parking lot behind the Palace Theatre in the early morning hours when it manged to get itself stuck across all lanes of Spring street.
The driver, perhaps to avoid parked cars in the lot, pulled straight across the street and then tried to back up, only to find himself stuck. The crown of the street was likely his undoing, as the back of the trailer dug into the concrete of the sidewalk.
After the crew spent time trying to free the truck itself, a tow truck was called and arrived on scene soon after 7am. It is currently working to free the truck. LADOT traffic officers have been at the corner of 6th and Spring routing autos east on 6th.
Update (7:52am): Traffic was just allowed to return to Spring street.
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Sprung on February 08, 2009, at 05:50PM – #1
Wow, I wonder if this would have happened if this shoot had decided to use Canada as its location? I hear Canada's nice there this time of year.
Benjamin Pezzillo on February 16, 2009, at 08:21PM – #2
This is one of those not-so-uncommon moments when film production Downtown can be computed as a net negative economic impact:
(Value of Peoples' Time) x (Amount of Time Impacted) x (Number of People Impacted) = Net Waste of Other Peoples' Time Related to Film Production
Working off a mean wage of $15 per hour per person, one fifteen minute detour or delay equals $3.75 per person of lost time. At rush hour, three buses carry about 100 people (could be more or less). So, for every three buses impacted for 15 minutes, $375 is lost in the value of the time of the people on those buses. This does not account for the lost operating time of the buses themselves (fuel, operating cost, driver, etc.).
In the case of the above, there's a minimum of one full hour of closure on a major bus street (South Spring) during the morning rush. Presuming the buses southbound on Spring had to go east on Sixth, South on Los Angeles and West on Seventh then South on Spring to recover, calculating a 15 minute delay is reasonable.
How many buses were impacted over that one hour - 36? 48? 60?. Let's go with 48 as I think there may be a dozen routes with an average of four buses an hour that time of day. That's a net loss of $6000 in time for the 1,600 estimated people on buses impacted by this film production. That doesn't even account for people in passenger cars or eastbound bus traffic on Sixth (like the 720 Metro Rapid) that would also be delayed because of the heavy traffic from the detour.
Generally speaking, if the basis for a film production's economic impact to Los Angeles is $150,000 per day, it only takes a film crew disrupting 40,000 people Downtown for 15 minutes to negate that positive benefit.
Given a workday concentration of 500,000 people Downtown, I think that this happens much more often Downtown than people who defend over-filming realize or admit. Correcting the approach to filming Downtown to eliminate brief but mass disruptions is long overdue.