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DOT is in the Pocket of the NIMBY’s |
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Decisions come from the Westside
By Harold Katz
The NIMBYs would have you believe that the jobs and the traffic they bring are because of the dastardly developers. They are wrong. The reason is that the people who make the decisions as to where they want to be have their offices or their businesses primarily live on the Westside.
At one point in the not so distant past my partner and I could have
moved our CPA office downtown and reduced our rent by almost 50% but we
decided we would rather pay the higher rent and live within 1.2 miles
of our homes. There is a second reason of course and that is because
certain addresses have a cache about them. The four that come to mind
quickly are Wilshire Blvd, Century City, Beverly Hills and Water
Gardens.
I want to focus on the first group, those that live on the Westside. And there are a lot of them. They are the alleged constituents of the NIMBYs but they are the silent majority and everything the NIMBYs do negatively impacts on their commutes to work and on their family outings.
My pet peeve is traffic mitigation such as narrowing roads from two lanes to one by painting white stripes … such as Montana and Beverly Glen South of Sunset … the atrocity that is now Motor Avenue … and the fact that I can’t take my old route from my Condo to Ralph’s, Best Buy and In and Out Burger in Westwood.
I’d like to see a Supreme Court ruling on converting public streets to private drives.
The Department of Transportation is in the pocket of the NIMBYs.
Where is Sam Taylor when we need him (former head of DOT and long ago passed away). Getting a stop sign out of him was almost impossible as he thought his job was to move cars. Today the main concern of DOT is to stop cut through traffic. There is as much chance of doing that as there is winning the drug war.
At some point the silent majority is going to begin to roar, in fact I’m surprised the people who live in Holmby Westwood aren’t already complaining that they can’t get into Westwood from their homes without driving South to Wilshire Blvd and adding to that traffic.
Yesterday I testified at the first public hearing on the new Westfield Century City development plan. I pointed out that there were about 500-600 people there. 150 were union workers from the construction world, leaving about 350 residents, business people don’t come out for these things. I pointed out that while 350 residents is a nice showing, there were another 100,000+ residents who the City Planning Department will never hear from, the silent majority, who will benefit from the new project.
I also pointed out that I have attended many such hearings over 38 years and the complaints are always the same shadows from tall buildings and traffic. The sky is always falling and it never falls.
Does traffic get worse, of course it does, see my Op-Ed from the Los Angeles Business Journal at the bottom of this email and you will know why.
Some people will just give up and move away and that is okay as Southern California is 220 miles long and about 40 miles wide and it is the greatest climate in the world, it is a dynamic economic engine for all of California, it offers unlimited opportunities for young people to succeed and the center of the economic engine is here on the Westside with almost 500,000 jobs and closing rapidly on downtown, which is why we need rail. (Harold Katz is a long-time public transportation activist and a contributor to CityWatch.) (Read Steve Lopez column on traffic here ) ◘
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 64
Pub: Aug 8, 2008
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