I would argue that to a great extent, worries about sprawl and traffic have developed not because our situation is so bad but precisely because it is so good. In good economic times, expectations tend to run ahead of what is possible. And soaring expectations rather than actual problems are, I believe, responsible for a good deal of our contemporary discontent....

Even when speeds on the freeway decline to 20 mph, drivers throughout the Los Angeles area move more quickly than they do by car or public transportation at the center of almost any large, older city in Europe or the United States....When it comes to automobile travel, Los Angeles, perhaps more than almost any other large city in the world, suffers from a deflation of greatly raised expectations. After all, the residents of Paris, New York or Tokyo never even entertained the possibility that they could drive through the center of the city at 60 mph.

The approaching deadline has caught many business owners, professionals and residents off guard, especially those with automatic dialing machines that must be reprogrammed or replaced. These include internal business systems, speed-dialing equipment, call-forwarding devices, computers, alarm systems, cell phones and any other piece of equipment that stores a phone number that can be used for automatic dialing.

“Almost nobody I’m talking to is aware of this. People are going to wake up on July 27 and find their phones or speed dialers will not work,” said Steve Diels, who runs a call center in Redondo Beach.

Hardest hit are likely to be owners or operators of facilities with secured-entry systems that rely on visitors dialing an entry code that speed dials a number. Many of these machines must be reprogrammed, while some older ones that can only store seven digits must be replaced entirely.