For most New Yorkers, the only other place they’d live is California

There’s an advert on the New York City subway showing two dinosaurs talking to each other over the top of the skyline (no, I don’t know why either). “I’m thinking of moving to LA,” says one, his scaly head poking out from beyond the Empire State Building. “You’re dead to me,” replies the other, curling a claw around the top of an apartment block.

Moving from east coast to west (and vice versa) is such a common occurrence here in the US that jokes about those conversations – the ones where sodden, snow-covered, shivering New Yorkers swear over picklebacks in dive bars that they’ll never endure another east coast winter again so they’re decamping to the sunny, palm-lined west coast once and for all – are prime advertising fodder.

They also power huge sections of the economy: there are entire moving companies, with fleets of pet-friendly trucks, which specifically shuttle between New York and California and back again. If you’re moving from your home in Wisconsin to a new life in New Mexico, you might struggle to find people willing to help you lug your bed, sofa and 17 puppies across the country – but if you’re San Francisco-bound from a studio in Brooklyn, people will fall over themselves to offer you business.

Because of this, there’s a lot of friendly rivalry between LA and New York City which goes back decades (who could forget when Katy Perry released the 2010 song “California Gurls” as a slightly underwhelming “response” to Alicia Keys and Jay-Z’s love song to New York, “Empire State of Mind?”) This year, the Los Angeles Times even ran an April Fool’s column titled: “For cramped New York, an expanding dining scene”, which spoke of “an unlivable urban wasteland” and a “culinary heart of darkness” punctuated by “rats, black trash bags and graffiti-tagged storefronts”. It was tongue-in-cheek, but it also drew attention to what irks west-coasters the most: New Yorkers like to claim they’re at the centre of the foodie universe and that their cultural output is indisputably higher than glitzy, ditzy LA – but not everyone is buying it.

Ask an NYC resident why they’d never up sticks and move to the beaches of California, and they’ll tell you they just couldn’t face the traffic jams. Los Angeles is known for being a city where everyone has a car – unlike New York, the sidewalks are not pedestrian-friendly and you can’t fill your whole night by hopping between bars and restaurants which are all within a block or two of each other – and the resultant rush hour traffic jams are downright notorious.

Angry Californians will counter that New York’s subway system isn’t exactly a dream either. The underground trains might run 24 hours, but they have a nasty habit of suddenly diverting themselves: “This Q is now an N train,” the driver might say rapidly and incoherently while you still have your earphones in, and that’s if you’re lucky. Most of the time you’ll just find out when you pull in to the next station and realise you’re inexplicably in Queens. (If you’ve spent time living and working in London, however – especially if you’ve ever been a regular user of the Central line – you still find yourself unendingly grateful for those air-conditioned New York carriages, where there’s standing room for everyone rather than crouching room only for those more than 6ft tall.)

Like all good rivalries, the NYC-LA one is born out of familiarity and grudging love – the most common flight route in the US is the one between New York and Los Angeles, and when asked, New Yorkers will admit that the only other place they’d live is California. “I’ll probably stay in New York my whole life,” one friend said recently, “or maybe go direct to LA. I’d rather do that than visit real America.” Like the phrase attributed to George Bernard Shaw which states that the English and Americans are two nations divided by a common language, New York and Los Angeles are two cities united by a common nation – and specifically united by the fact that neither of them likes that nation very much.