Readers React: More New York-style ‘interactions’ with congestion? No thanks.

To the editor: Some days you just have to laugh to keep from crying. What a great example of the absurdity of our lives: two diametrically opposed articles relating to traffic in Los Angeles. In the Opinion section, Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner, says that “mobility is overrated” and implies ludicrously that prosperity follows congestion (when, obviously, congestion — too many people for the available facilities — follows prosperity). He praises congestion for promoting more social interaction. (“Why a car-centric transportation plan is folly for L.A.,” Op-Ed, Sept. 2)

Hold that thought, because elsewhere in Wednesday’s paper was a frightening article about some of those wonderful social interactions in San Francisco, where a pack of bicyclists deliberately stopped vehicle traffic and damaged a car that tried to go around by bashing in the hood. Great — makes us all feel sympathy for those poor cyclists who take over that city the last Friday of every month, something the city obviously condones by doing nothing.

I have been to Schwartz’s New York City and seen the mobility and social interactions he brags about. No thanks. And maybe San Francisco will decide to stop looking the other way. Never mind — see that part about laughing instead of crying. We’re doomed.

Harry Pope, Long Beach

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To the editor: Nowhere in Schwartz’s mathematical analyses is a variable weighting quality of life, concerns of home-owners or public safety.

In my neighborhood, some people living near a double-blind curve have begged for years to get a four-way stop sign at our corner and have gotten the same traffic engineering rhetoric we read in this piece. The nearby Wilshire Boulevard bus lane has pushed tons of cars into our residential neighborhood, increasing the real risk of accidents and injury at our corner, let alone (facetiously) the risk of heart attack and stroke to all the drivers sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the remaining lanes of Wilshire.

Note to Schwartz and the L.A. City Council: We don’t want to be New York.

Howard C. Mandel, Los Angeles

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