PLATFORM : We Would Get Our Streets Back

I believe that completing the freeway will return the streets of South Pasadena to the citizens, will allow the merchants to do business, will build better retail development for the town, will be safer for children and quieter for schools. There will be less smog, noise, etc.

Right now, you can’t get out on to Orange Grove or Fremont in the neighborhood where I live during the morning or evening hours, and sometimes clear into the night. Fremont is just a belt of traffic.

Just because the freeway has not been completed, the freeway traffic hasn’t stopped running. It just comes right in through town. (If the 710 were completed,) the people who have no business in town would remain on the freeway.

That’s been proven. Look what happened in Eagle Rock: They got Colorado Boulevard back. The heavy through traffic that is actually freeway traffic would be removed from local use of the street.

I live right above the Pasadena Freeway, and I have for 31-some-odd years, and you hear the traffic, but you don’t hear it like you do on the surface streets. And you don’t have the dirt from the tires that comes off from the surface streets, you don’t have the smog from the stop-and-go traffic that’s all over our streets, and you have a quieter situation. You don’t have the revving of engines.

A number of the merchants that I know did not stay in South Pasadena because the noise from the traffic made it impossible to do business on the streets.

People have no place to park--there are parking facilities being developed, but the people who want to park have to come through such heavy traffic to park anywhere near their destination that alleviation of congestion would make it a more desirable place to come and shop. And then, if you do have that atmosphere, people who want to shop will come here, rather than coming to a mall, which is a terrible congestion in itself. It would give us an opportunity to build a nice retail trade like we used to have in South Pasadena.

I know what the streets were like before, and I know what they’re like now, and I hope we can have what we had before the whole city was ruined by bad planning and zoning. Fair Oaks was always an alternative for trucks from the freeway, but we never had the volume we do today. It was just a nice small town.