Pedestrian Tunnels

Here’s another heavy-handed City Hall program pushed down the Valley’s throat.

When freeways are built with offramps a mile apart, there are often pedestrian bridges or tunnels built between the offramps to permit local residents to have access to their neighborhoods.

Along comes City Council to spend thousands of dollars to close up six of these. The reasons given are to relieve the police, sanitation, and anti-graffiti departments of their responsibilities to maintain them, just as they do for all other streets, bridges, and tunnels in Los Angeles.

In my particular case at Sale Avenue in Woodland Hills, I asked the two council members who sponsored the City Council action, Marvin Braude and Laura Chick, for an explanation. The aides in their offices confessed that there were no public hearings, that they had no files of any complaints, and that they had been approached by the city’s Bureau of Engineering to enact the closures because there were some funds available.

Further in the case at Sale Avenue, the tunnel is between Fallbrook and Shoup. Closing the tunnel now forces me and my daughter to run the gantlet of 100 itinerant workers who congregate at Fallbrook and the freeway every day. The dangers from these people are reflected in the need for a guard out in front of the 7-Eleven store and two guards for the Bank of America.

Why should the public be locked out of its own neighborhoods?

CARL OLSON

Woodland Hills