Eric Richardson [Flickr]

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Not too long after I got into work this morning there was an accident on 7th at Hope. Nothing all too interesting there -- it looks like the two cars just disagreed on who was heading where. The one pictured out in traffic with its door open looks to have bent a wheel, though, and ended up disabled.

The interesting bit is the response times. You've got a disabled vehicle blocking a full direction on 7th Street, and it's been there for over a half hour at this point. Still there's no tow-truck, and 7th Street looks good and backed up.

After three or four minutes an ambulance stopped. He checked to make sure everyone was ok, and seems to have listened to the stories about what happened. After maybe 25 minutes the BID's purple people showed up and set up the fun bike traffic block. And only now, a good half hour after the thing occured (and after I took the picture), did LAPD arrive.

Update (1pm): I don't know exactly what time the vehicles were moved, but they were still there (though a tow truck had shown up) when I biked by at 11:30. So that's roughly an hour and fifteen minutes with westbound 7th street completely blocked on a workday.