The Traffic Mess
The San Diego City Council has done it again. The recently passed traffic mobility program, which relies heavily on the business community--under threat of official sanction--to solve the traffic problem by forcing car pooling on its employees, is a Band-Aid applied to a cancer. Councilman Bob Filner, in voting against this measure, rightly characterized it as an attempt to solve a problem by creating one more expensive bureaucracy; another multimillion-dollar political boondoggle of which the council seems so fond.
The traffic crisis in San Diego is not even a true problem, but only the symptom of a problem, namely uncontrolled growth. The council could better spend its time (and our money) by putting together an ordinance composed of the best parts of last year’s developer-subverted, growth-control ballot measures and passing it. A strong growth-control ordinance, one impervious to any developer-backed machinations, together with a series of precisely targeted traffic construction projects to relieve the choke points, is the only possible answer to the traffic crisis in San Diego.
CHARLES J. DIETZ
San Diego
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