The latest push to widen the 405, create car pool lanes, and help alleviate the constant congestion on the San Diego Freeway is desperately overdue. The $1 Billion dollar project is being pushed by Mayor Villaraigosa and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. But is the idea a good solution?
A carpool lane from Orange County to the Northern tip of the San Fernando Valley is part of the plan. Hybrid cars, whose numbers are increasing daily, would be allowed inside the carpool roadway, even with a single driver.
But the whole idea of how the expansion is to be built is shortsighted. There is no plan, for example, to build a train or monorail across the Sepulveda Pass. The pass area itself has been denatured with the massive Getty and Skirball complexes ruining one of the loveliest isolated areas within metropolitan Los Angeles.
The congestion on the West Side is partially due to the monstrous expansion of Playa Vista and the Olympic Boulevard entertainment industry without any addition of light rail or monorail systems. We have the strange phenomenon of hipster liberals, (usually named “Zoe” “Alexa” “Lucas” or “Josh”) who are opponents of global warming. Yet there they are, sitting in traffic in their SUV’s, Priuses and Mini-Coops… on their way to edit documentaries about global warming.
It is all fine and popular for politicians to appeal to the wealthiest and most educated section of Los Angeles by promising “relief” but the shortsighted schemes they propose are without imagination or daring. They are simply a continuation of the same old lifestyle, for just a billion more.
Here in Van Nuys 