We are flying into LAX from NJ on a Friday in September.

We'll be arriving at 3pm (LA time) and renting a car and driving to San Diego for the first leg of our vacation.

I figure we'll get on the road at 4pm - right before rush hour.

Does anyone know about the rush hour traffic from LA to San Diego on Friday afternoons?

My 2 year old son will have been traveling for 6-7 hours already and I feel terrible about sticking him in a car for another 1 1/2 - especially if we are going to hit traffic.

These were not my plans. I'm going on a family vacation and had zero say in the travel plans (for that I'm angry).

If the traffic is really bad, my husband and I are considering renting our own car, paying for an extra hotel room in LA and going to San Diego the next day. We already are going in for a rental car with my family and we have already pre-paid for a hotel room in San Diego --- so renting another car and staying will be an added expense.

Thanks.

Sorry to say that the L.A. to San Diego traffic is at its absolute worst on Friday evenings.

I live in Oceanside which is the northern-most city in San Diego County. We don't use the I-5 on Friday afternoon to go even a few miles. It is gridlocked from the Los Angeles area tourists coming to San Diego as well as the usual Friday evening moving around by the locals.

While it should ease up a bit this month, September is still a prime month for tourism.

I would vote for the overnight stay in L.A. Get a good night's rest and then make your way down to San Diego early Saturday morning (the earlier the better).

By the way, I should have added that your 1 1/2 hour estimate on the drive time is extremely optimistic. I think 2 1/2 hours would be more like it.

Originally posted by stephanie01
My 2 year old son will have been traveling for 6-7 hours already and I feel terrible about sticking him in a car for another 1 1/2 - especially if we are going to hit traffic.

You are almost certainly looking at much longer than 1 1/2 hours from LAX to San Diego if you are leaving at 4pm on a Saturday afternoon.

You don't say specifically what part of San Diego you are going to, but the drive time from LAX to downtown San Diego is roughly 2 hours with fairly minimal traffic. In Friday afternoon rush hour, I'm guessing you are looking at 3-4 hours minimum.

I'd tend to concur with your suggestion of finding a motel for the night and driving down to San Diego on Saturday morning. You should find the traffic situation to be vastly preferable that way. You should still plan on close to 2 hours drive time, but it should be pretty continuously moving traffic rather than just sitting there not moving.

Alternately, if it isn't pushing too far past your child's bed time, you could try waiting a few hours and leaving for San Diego around 7 or 8pm. While you could still run into a few pockets of heavier traffic, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as you would experience leaving at 4pm. If you took that approach, my suggestion would be to go over to the Santa Monica Pier area and/or Venice Beach for a couple hours. Both are pretty interesting tourist spots that are close to the airport. Another option might be to drive as far as Long Beach and visit the aquarium or some of the other tourist spots in that area before heading out on the road again.

-Jeff

I agree with everyone that a drive from LAX to San Diego is rarely fun at any time of day, but a Friday afternoon at 4:00pm is almost suicidal.

Have you thought of other options? For instance, you could look into a commuter flight from LAX to San Diego's airport, or Carlsbad's airport if your destination is northern San Diego beach cities.

What about the train? You could try taking a cab to Los Angeles Union Station and purchasing tickets on the Surfliner. It's a very nice double-decker train that leaves every hour and speeds right along the ocean for a good stretch of it's route to San Diego's Santa Fe Station.

Or, you could rent a car at LAX, slog through 90 minutes of traffic to get to the Disneyland area, check into a decent motel in the Resort area and spend the evening at Downtown Disney/relaxing in the motel room. Then in the morning you could do the drive down to San Diego which would be a good 90 minutes from Disneyland without traffic.

I live in Orange County and visit San Diego regularly. Without traffic it's a 80 minute drive. With traffic or congestion it easily turns into 2+ hours of driving from San Diego. Which is why I take the train so much, along with millions of other people.

Regardless, driving from LAX to San Diego is possible on a late Friday afternoon. But it's not going to be fun for anyone involved.

As a father of 4 who has made that trip several times in the past, including right after a plane ride, I can attest that you are in for a LONG drive on Friday afternoon. In fact, the term "Rush Hour" doesn't apply on Southern California highways. That whole stretch of the Interstate 405/5 will be packed from early afternoon through late evening. The sporatic carpool lanes will help you out somewhat, but even they will back up on a Friday afternoon. The trip will take 4 hours or more at that time.

In addition, keep in mind that Saturday is not much better on I-5 from El Toro all the way down to Del Mar. The last time I went down that stretch on a Saturday, I never got over 30mph the whole way. Two of my kids got car sick on that hell of a journey (as I didn't anticipate the magnitude of the trip beforehand). If you do make the trip on Saturday morning, leave VERY early.

What I would do in your shoes .... Set up a plan like JeffG said, but you definitely want to go in the direction of San Diego. You should be able to take the carpool lane on the I-405 from LAX down to Long Beach with little difficulty. Take I-710 down to the Long Beach Marina, see the acquarium and have a leasurely dinner down there. Then take off from Long Beach at about 8pm and head on down to San Diego. Hope that your child will be exhausted by this time and fall asleep for the trip -- Chewable Drammamine does wonders for getting my children to sleep during lengthy trips.

Good luck and have fun! We'll be making that same LA / San Diego journey once again this October, so I certainly understand your reservations. With a little foresight and patience, you'll have a great trip.

I would also doubt you'll be able to land at 3pm and be on the road in a rental by 4pm. You might want to consider staying in LA overnight and leaving early next morning - or at the very least find someplace to hang out for a couple hours *then* try to head to San Diego.

Not to pile on, but if you are headed to downtown San Diego, then JeffG's estimate of 3-4 hours is pretty accurate on a Friday leaving around 4 or 5 pm. Jeffport is also correct, Saturday can be pretty bad going south on the 5 (the main LA to SD freeway), so make sure if you stay over you leave EARLY on Saturday morning.

Best bet, hang loose till about 8 or 9pm on Friday, then head down.

Just a quick semantic note. In Southern California, 4pm is not "right before rush hour" it is rush hour. I doesn't get more rush hour than that.

Just don't give your kid a can of Red Bull before the drive.

Another voice on the 4 hour drive.

*IF* you have to do it right then, an alternative to taking the 5 all the way down (I don't think the 5 is around LAX) is to take the 405 south to the 73 (it's a toll road in Orange County). The 73 has minimal traffic and puts you out right on the 5 south. It could cut off an hour of your drive.

I know you may have heard enough by now, but just to add a voice from someone who used to live in Philadelphia and did that exact trip with a two-year old, for your sake and for the sake of your child, do not try to do the drive to San Diego on the Friday night. The long flight coupled with the three-hour time shift is going to make for a tired child (and parents for that matter). If you cannot switch destination airports from LAX to SAN, then I would recommend finding a hotel close fairly close to the airport and relaxing near the beach for a few hours on Friday and then leaving early--although with the time change it will not feel as early--on Saturday and make the drive a two-hour drive rather than the three to four hours of misery that is the Friday commute. If you must be in San Diego early Saturday, I would still recommend getting a room in LA for the night and leaving really early the next morning. After living in the NE Corridor, I am ashamed to say that I have never used the Amtrak system here, but I have seen the trains that run from LA to SD and they look pretty nice and may be worth looking into. Any good luck.

None of us should probably try to get jobs with either the Port Of Los Angeles press office or the Chamber of Commerce, should we? While living in SoCal has a great many benefits over several of the other large American cities I've lived in, the dumpy/overgrown LAX airport or the mass freeway migration of a Friday afternoon are not the area's strong points.

Khiori has a very good point that getting out of LAX in a rental car in under an hour is overly optimistic. LAX is a HUGE airport that is sort of a mish-mash of buildings from the 1960's to 1990's, and it's all very messy, confusing and inneficient. I would give myself at least 90 minutes to deplane, collect luggage, shuttle to car rental terminal just east of airport, collect car, pack car and be on the freeway.

What I think we're all telling you is that your attempt to fly in to LAX and drive to San Diego on a Friday afternoon is sort of a "Southern California Worst Case Scenario". Basically, anything but what you are attempting to do would be better.

Les us know how it all turns out, won't you? And please tell us that you'll at least get a visit to Disneyland out of the trip from New Jersey to SoCal.

Thanks for all your responses.

We are staying over Friday night and leaving early Saturday.

My idea of a great trip would have been to stay the entire week in Disney with a side trip to one of the nearby attractions.

My parents and my brother insisted on going to San Diego (my brother lives in San Francisco...he is taking a flight into San Diego.

We will be staying at Disneyland Hotel for 4 nights.:)

I know this is off-topic -- but Oceanside rocks, sort of don't want people to find out about this sleepy beach town: cheap drinks, bonfires on the beach, skate park near beach, Regal cinemas, plenty of cheap internet access at Armands, and cheap food. That's all I wanted to say.