The Washington Post ran a lovely Metro section article this morning chronicling progress on the mammoth effort to re-engineer the Mixing Bowl from a slapdash mess of on-ramps, merges, exits, and bottlenecks into 50 graceful bridges and 24 streamlined lanes of traffic. As we read the first few sentences of this little human interest-style puff piece, a curious trend jumped out at us.

When Woodbridge resident Kit Oliva first drove across the new Springfield interchange ramp, she was whisked away to a place where the highways somehow seem a little more glamorous.

“It didn’t feel like Virginia,” she said. “There were so many lanes. It was like ‘Wow, I’m in California.'”

Oliva is a postal carrier, and she braves the Mixing Bowl daily. Her sister lives in Southern California — a land of extravagant interchanges and famous freeways. Springfield’s new ramp is a smooth ride, she said, with broad shoulders and breezy merging. Just like the ones in Los Angeles.

The rest of the article followed suit, reporting responses from drivers that border on outright giddiness. We understand that those forced through the Mixing Bowl on a daily basis are relieved to have a safer and less congested commute. However, in a town that complains so often, so loudly, and with such good reason about traffic, we were a little surprised to find this much enthusiasm for the Angelino transportation model. Do D.C. drivers really have such lust for the asphalt spaghetti that ties Southern California together (or tangles it all up, depending on your points of view) or is it just a little Hollywood crush? Even more crucial, could the change cause D.C. drivers to begin to use the definite article when referring to our freeway system like they do on the West Coast?