Safety Concerns Over Sunset Project

The article “A New Sunset Boulevard Is in the Works” (Times, April 15) failed to mention major community concerns about highway safety and the environmental future of the Pacific Palisades.

If the eight widening projects are approved on Sunset, the roadway will be banked like a racecourse. City traffic records show that most Sunset accidents are caused by speeders, often under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The city’s race-track type of design for the Sunset Boulevard widening will only encourage the numerous speeders to drive even faster than they do now and will cause more deaths and injuries, not less.

Since the widenings aren’t continuous, there will be numerous bottlenecks, which will increase the driving hazards and will later generate the usual city justification for the future and complete widening of Sunset Boulevard.

Experience has shown that widenings always increase speed and traffic. Allenford has experienced a large increase in traffic as a result of the Sunset widening at Allenford.

Environmental opposition to the project centers on the city’s policy of treating each of the eight projects as environmentally separate and unrelated. The city, in its Negative Environmental Declarations, says that traffic won’t increase appreciably as a result of the widening. However, the substantial Sunset-Allenford traffic increase shows that the city is wrong. The increased Sunset traffic will generate large amounts of additional air, noise and water pollution in the Pacific Palisades. The widening will require the removal of hundreds of large trees with an accompanying increase in deadly particulate air pollution.

ALEXANDER M. MAN

Pacific Palisades