Readers React: 710 tunnel: If you build it, the cars will come -- too many cars

To the editor: How ironic: An Op-Ed article supporting an extension of the 710 Freeway by James E. Moore II appears in The Times on the same day as a report on a recent study by the American Highway Users Alliance showing that 11 of the worst highway bottlenecks in the country are in the Los Angeles area.

To these 11, Moore would add a 12th.

It is obvious that our freeway system is failing as the area’s primary mode of transportation. Little wonder. The system was fundamentally planned in the 1940s, at a time when the population of Los Angeles County was less than half of today’s and when private ownership of automobiles was less pervasive.

Sure, let’s repair and improve our existing freeways, but let’s ensure that new investments go into transportation projects that will better move people and goods, not cars. The estimate of $5.6 billion needed to build this 5-mile freeway tunnel, a study in instant obsolescence, would be much more wisely spent on improving our infrastructure and on alternate modes of transportation.

New freeway construction would simply encourage increasing use of automobiles and guarantee further gridlock for decades to come.

Donald Voss, La Cañada Flintridge

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To the editor: Had we spent the $6 million in 1959 and bulldozed South Pasadena to finish the 710, we’d be experiencing exactly the same traffic problems we have today. Imagine Los Angeles with a 405 Freeway east of downtown as well. Added capacity results in added demand.

Blaming big government and the “malarky factor” (code for “environmentalism”) for the cost increase is simply a ruse to protect the failed freeway system. The argument that if we just build one more freeway — if we just “complete the grid” — sounds like something an addict would say.

Please refer to the 405. Please look at the tunnel they’re failing at in Seattle. Please look at the budget of the leaky tunnel in Boston.

There’s no need to celebrate George Will’s manly ideal of “builders” — or Ayn Rand’s, for that matter — when they’re wrong.

Noel McCarthy, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Moore probably knows all too well how Spock on “Star Trek” must have felt. However illogical, humankind’s decision-making is greatly influenced by emotion, and that’s not going to change any time soon (especially as politicians continually pander to constituents’ emotions).

In the episode that has been the 710 gap, it’s very apparent that the needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the few.

Steve Shelburne, San Marino

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