Double decker highways and additional highway lanes on the 710 Freeway..do we really need more?

It's unfortunate, but buried within the legislative package of infrastructure projects that the Legislature passed last week, and that otherwise includes important goals such as affordable housing and education, will be a big chunk of change that will go to freeway building, particularly for increasing the ability to expand the movement of goods that flows through -- and pollutes -- the Southern California region. Translated: more freeway lanes or even a double decker of that most notorious of Southern California freeways, the 710.

It's ironic, or perhaps fitting, that passage of this infrastructure package is coming shortly before the 50th anniversary of the biggest public works project the world had ever seen at the time, according to then President Dwight Eisenhower. June 29, 1956 will mark the  anniversary of the Federal-Aid Highway Act that created our interstate highway system; legislation that ultimately transformed the country, producing freeways that cut through cities, establishing funding mechanisms that perpetuated freeway building and disguised their environmental and health costs further induced sprawl, and failed to address and provide for the costs of dislocation. After its passage, California jumped on the bandwagon in the late 1950s and early 1960s, determined to become its own mini-freeway nation, with plans, as Ethan Rarick's new book on Pat Brown notes, to construct as many as 12,000 freeway miles, while spending as much as one fourth of the state's entire annual budget over a 20 year period.

Like the interstate highway legislation from fifty years ago, the new proposed spending on freeway improvements for the movement of goods out of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will create new and disguised environmental, health, and community burdens and will basically ignore the intense opposition of communities whose places are most directly impacted by any such expansion. There is a rush to judgment on this issue, bound in part by electoral rather than community considerations. In the late 1950s, such community opposition was ignored until the damage was done. The lessons of 1956 suggest that in this aspect of the big funding package we don't need another huge investment in making goods cheaper for Wal-Mart while creating sacrifice zones in communities that line the freeway in this country, as well as those communities impacted by the huge port expansion in China that provides another dimension to this freeway expansion package.

Comments

[Adam Smith]

You are out of touch with reality. You clearly have plenty of money and dont care about the poor or working man. Instead of expanding freeways, trade and jobs you would put us back to the 1800 hundreds. How sad and foolish.

[Jake]

Do you ever drive on the freeways? Have you ever tried to get from Southern California to anywhere else in the state? Yes we need more!

You talk as if there are only trucks on the freeways and no one else. There are plenty of regular people out there too, but I guess your crusade against Wal Mart is too important to actually take us into consideration. Not only would freeway expansion allow me to spend more time with my family, it would also reduce pollution! Not to mention the fact that cheaper goods at Wal Mart is a benefit to the people that can't afford to shop wherever you do your shopping.

And why is it that supposed environmentalists never take into consideration the fact that having vehicles of all sorts stuck in stop and go traffic greatly increases our pollution? Expanding the freeways in LA would reduce the amount of time that cars and trucks are expelling exhaust. Reducing a 20 mile commute from an hour to half an hour would reduce the pollution by, guess what, 50%! And there are plenty of people that would be able to reduce their commutes, and the pollution they cause, by even more if it weren't for traffic congestion.

Take a minute from your Quixotic crusade against corporations to consider reality. From executives to janitors, we are all stuck on the freeways much longer than we need to be. That hurts our families, our jobs, our environment, and our economy. Our population has increased, its plainly obvious that we need to increase the infrastructure to support it.

[Rob]

I'm with Jake. It takes me 120 minutes to drive 30 miles. That is I average 15 mph down the 405 every freaking day.

I surely want and I think this whole city needs to do something about the freeway congestion.

California population is expected to double by 2050, mostly from Mexicans coming across the border.

[hopeful]

I strongly believe the Californian government should consider building a double decker highway. it would ease everyday traffic jams and commuter's frustration. CTY summer 2009=]

[ffxiv gil]

California population is expected to double by 2050, mostly from Mexicans coming across the border.

[discount coach]

Life is not fair, get used to it.Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.