Police: Traffic Halted By Closure of Major Roadway

Back in Brooklyn, when I was growing up in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, you could see beat patrolmen everywhere--policemen on foot covering assigned areas, always well-known to the residents and shopkeepers. There were also traffic cops--foot patrolmen who were stationed in the very center of large, complex intersections and who controlled the flow of vehicular traffic through their zones. During emergencies, beat patrolmen often stepped in and covered traffic problems quickly.

Times have changed. There is simply too much crime to have policemen on foot merely strolling their beats keeping an eye on things. Likewise, the traffic control officers have disappeared. It is not unusual to see vehicular anarchy rampant while police make absolutely no effort to assist. And so it was recently when the hillside piled up on Pacific Coast Highway. The police dutifully erected barriers to prevent cars from traveling into the affected area. Thousands of cars were shunted onto Sunset Boulevard eastbound and onto Temescal northbound. At the intersection of Sunset and Temescal, all of these were subjected to the tyranny of a four-way signal badly biased for such huge flow. A few hundred feet further east, a pedestrian crosswalk with a push-button stop feature played havoc with the autos at the whim of shoppers.

It took me one hour and 10 minutes to traverse the Palisades area from Sunset to Allenford, normally about a 10-minute drive. Where were the police? Why doesn’t someone get out to their patrol car and start waving hundreds of cars through problem zones like that? And stopping late afternoon lollygaggers from pushing those infernal crosswalk buttons?

No, I really don’t long to go back to Brooklyn. But some things were really a lot better in the good old days in the good old neighborhood.

MARK A. STERN

Beverly Hills