To the editor: Relating to “the ‘nuclear choice’ in L.A.’s struggle to rein within the mighty automobile” Angelenos generally oppose bike lanes and sluggish streets in isolation as a result of they don’t see the way it advantages drivers.
However while you add car-free inexpensive housing to the combination, the mix can convert skeptics. L.A. is planning so as to add tens of millions of latest properties within the coming years to deal with our housing disaster. This might compound our site visitors nightmare. However in the event you construct housing on walkable streets close to transit, jobs and facilities, you create a 15-minute group, the place folks can meet most of their weekly wants with out having to drive.
Eradicating parking makes housing extra inexpensive, and constructing above native companies on streets with protected bike and bus lanes makes it attainable to stay car-free even within the final automobile metropolis. This results in much less site visitors and a more healthy local weather. Who doesn’t need that? We have to assume holistically about transportation and housing.
Jenny Hontz, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Site visitors is so horrible — shutting down or eradicating lanes on roads shouldn’t be a sensible reply. However defending cyclists and pedestrians is crucial.
What are different concepts that would work? What about eradicating road parking, creating bike lanes as an alternative, with concrete limitations for cyclists’ safety. Construct city-run metered parking garages all through town to interchange the road parking.
This might preserve streets and lanes open to site visitors, create security zones for bikes and the income from metered garages may waylay a minimum of a few of the prices.
We’re a metropolis of inventive folks. There must be a option to preserve site visitors flowing and defend cyclists and pedestrians.
Lisa A. Landres, Venice
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To the editor: It’s disingenuous for The Occasions to current one more piece on changing L.A. streets from automobile to bicycle site visitors with out together with detailed dialogue about one factor that would make this laudable purpose a actuality: a halfway-decent mass transit system.
In L.A. folks nonetheless should drive to work. We aren’t Amsterdam, the place town and suburbs are crisscrossed with well timed trams, buses and Metro stops.
Now we have a distressing system that run intermittently, typically each 20 minutes or so, which is among the main causes folks must drive their automobiles.
Till this adjustments dramatically, eradicating automobile lanes is futile and can solely result in the protests and bottlenecks earlier “street diets” have triggered.
Additionally, the typical August excessive temperature in Amsterdam is 71 levels. Individuals can experience bikes to work carrying enterprise fits. Think about the folly of anticipating Angelenos to do the identical each day in a sizzling week like this one.
Kirk Jordan, Lengthy Seaside
