Santa Monica City Council has a lunatic plan to – Latest News
Common sense simply is likely to be lifeless at Santa Monica City Hall.
How else to clarify a proposal to rip out a massive swath of Interstate 10?
The City Council in June voted 7-0 to settle for a $2 million federal grant to examine “cap parks” over the Santa Monica Freeway between eleventh and twentieth streets.
How else to clarify a proposal to rip out a massive swath of Interstate 10? trekandphoto – stock.adobe.com
But council members didn’t stop there. They additionally informed workers (with straight faces) to examine obliterating that section of the freeway.
Evidently, council members suppose Santa Monica would benefit from destroying the principle transportation route out and in of the town.
The time period for that is sheer lunacy.
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City officers declare the stretch of freeway, which opened within the Sixties, displaced more than 1,500 residents in what’s now a principally black and Latino neighborhood.
Apparently they might atone for that now, 60 years later, by crippling everybody’s capability to join with the remaining of Los Angeles.
To dump even a fraction of Santa Monica’s I-10 site visitors onto metropolis floor streets would create soul-crushing gridlock on arteries resembling Pico, Olympic and Santa Monica boulevards.
AP
That’s what the council desires? For actual?
Just this week, City Manager Oliver Chi bemoaned declining tourism in Santa Monica, blaming that handy villain Donald Trump.
But the president apart, what precisely do Chi and the council count on to occur to tourism in the event that they cut freeway entry to the seaside?
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It actually received’t go up.
If solely this farce have been a story from the Babylon Bee, or the Onion, or one other satire publication.
Building a park over the freeway, given the town’s myriad different wants, is foolish enough. But ripping up the freeway? That’s simply bonkers.
The council will virtue-signal, some neighborhood zealots would possibly declare a win, and maybe a few residents would favor a freeway-less utopia to the sensible wants of every day residing close to the coast.
If solely this farce have been a story from the Babylon Bee, or the Onion, or one other satire publication. Shutterstock / Dado Photos
But c’mon.
Like it or not, getting round LA requires freeway driving. This area –– in contrast to dense metro areas resembling New York or San Francisco –– doesn’t lend itself to mass public transit in lieu of car journey.
Of course, the Santa Monica Freeway can’t be eviscerated with out approval from the state and federal governments.
But the grant for this examine comes courtesy of the US Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which funds efforts to “repair” neighborhoods divided by main transportation infrastructure.
And the California Legislature created a related program in 2023.
Ugh. How about –– as an alternative of nursing grievances and squandering taxpayer {dollars} on political vainness tasks –– we retain trendy conveniences and defend high quality of life for present and future residents?
Again: When there’s critical dialogue of ripping out important transportation corridors, common sense has left the building.
That’s why Santa Monica voters ought to look fastidiously on the candidates for 3 council seats on the Nov. 3 poll.
Who has a forward-looking imaginative and prescient for the town? And who favors turning the transportation clock back to the Sixties?
