The Traffic Equation

May 11, 2004

Dear Editor,

Yes, traffic in Santa Monica is out of control, but whose fault is it? (“Traffic Out of Control, Residents Warn,” May 6, 2004)

Is the 20-year grand experiment the Santa Monica City politicians, both past and present, have foisted upon the populace through their so-called City Traffic Engineering Department responsible? Remember they said cars are icky, and they were going to make them go away by providing anti-traffic flow choke points on all kinds of streets, then the cars will magically disappear.

Or is it the massive amount of rampant redevelopment that occurred in Santa Monica during the same period and perpetrated by the same Santa Monica politicians? I'm afraid it's both and frankly, logically, what did everyone expect?

When main artery streets are choked down losing lanes of travel, and other streets are closed off or made traffic inhospitable, coupled with a business redevelopment project that brought in scads of people who primarily use their cars for transportation, what did they expect?

Soccer Moms and Movie Moguls don't use the blue bus to get around. In fact the very people who might use public transportation, have had their jobs driven out of Santa Monica. Lower paying less tax-dollar-producing, industrial or commercial jobs have gone away in S.M., replaced with the upper-middle class and downright wealthy class jobs and businesses.

Let's face it, if you can afford to own a Beemer, a Mercedes or a Lexus, you don't ride the bus! And there is no train.

Other little items everyone never seems to think of get in the equation as well. How about the fact that Santa Monica is surrounded by Los Angeles and lots of people need to use Santa Monica streets to pass through or go to work in Santa Monica.

Remember when there was hardly a line on 23rd Street where it goes down around Santa Monica. airport to Venice and Mar Vista. Then there is a little thing called the I-10, the main freeway for the Westside of Los Angeles, which every day brings countless people commuting to or from it to other areas, via Santa Monica.

Finally there are the little zoning changes like removing all the gasoline retailers from Montana Avenue, which force all those gas-guzzling Mercedes and SUVs halfway across town in order to fill up. Yeah even those seemingly little changes made a holistic change and added to the problem. A problem that took years of deliberate planning to create the present mess.

Chris Williams