Caution: Rough Road Ahead for ‘Smart Street’ in South County

* Your article on the proposed Moulton Smart Street (“Not a Through Street,” May 23) focuses on the trade-offs cities face when balancing regional traffic needs with local community values.

To their credit, most local elected officials and residents interviewed wanted their cities to be more than just conduits for ever rising traffic volumes and speeds.

Certainly benign improvements like signal coordination and computerization must be completed.

But the physical widening of streets, the removal of on-street parking and the expanding of intersections into vast asphalt wastelands are enormously costly both in money and to the unique ambience that we all hold dear of our individual communities.

Orange Countians do more than just drive through our cities. We also have to live in them.

CHRIS NORBY

Fullerton

Norby is a member of the Fullerton City Council.

* It was with great disappointment, but no surprise, that I read the article (May 23) on the Smart Street issue in Orange County. There were three lines in that article which were attributed to me. While correct, they are not accurate.

I have been involved with this street issue since the first explosive confrontation with the Orange County Board of Supervisors in 1977.

In Laguna Niguel, the short section of Street of the Golden Lantern from Crown Valley south to Paseo De Colinas was originally called Chapparosa. I watched this road being built in 1971, along with my home which abuts it.

In this section the current vehicle count is 30,000 trips a day, which pass within 10 to 20 feet of the homes in my neighborhood.

The projection is for over 60,000 trips a day within the next few years. No matter if Smart Street status occurs or not. This then brings me to the quotation in your paper.

Please finish my statement, “I guess it’s not unbearable” with, “for people who are profoundly deaf,” which was not included in reference to the noise in my backyard.

The statement, “but I’m going to fight this thing all the way” was in reference to obtaining relief from the current environmental nightmare to which we are subjected, and not in reference to the resistance to implementing Smart Street status.

I see the change to Smart Street as an avenue to obtaining funding to do something about the miserable mess that Supervisor Riley and the Board of Supervisors have thrust us into by the original underhanded connection of Golden Lantern to Chapparosa to Moulton Parkway to Irvine Center Drive to Edinger Avenue.

By your inadequate reporting on this issue and my position on it, you have done me and my neighbors no service.

Fighting improvements to traffic flow is in the long run counterproductive.

I feel we should focus our energies in making the current situation right and ensuring that the future traffic and environmental issues are handled in a more humane way than they were in the past by the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

W.E. WOOD JR.

Laguna Niguel