Roads and Sprawl

Re “Into Gear at Last,” Ventura County editorials, July 4.

Your editorial shows that you have fallen for the myths that the transportation trio (the Southern California Assn. of Governments, Caltrans and the Ventura County Transportation Commission) have been espousing for years.

They have justified various proposed transportation “improvements” throughout Ventura County because of these same 250 trucks emanating daily from the Port of Hueneme.

SCAG, as the official procurer of transportation funds for the area, pried loose billions of dollars from the federal pork barrel at least partly by grossly inflating the size of the port and the alleged need for improved port access in its regional transportation plan.

Likewise, Caltrans and VCTC have used that minuscule number of trucks to help push for a State Road 118 transportation corridor through the Las Posas Valley. Now The Times justifies the expenditure of $70 million to include paving over an additional mile of farmland by citing the improvement of safety and quality of life for residents of Oxnard and Port Hueneme. It is amazing what a measly 10.417 trucks an hour can justify.

As the residents and motorists of the Las Posas Valley, Somis and Moorpark can attest, truckers have been using Rice Avenue for years to access State Road 118 via the Ventura Freeway interchange and Santa Clara Avenue. It allows them to bypass the Conejo Grade truck scales on Highway 101. The $25-million interchange will only direct more trucks onto State Road 118 and through to Moorpark.

That poor beleaguered city has thousands of trucks spewing noxious soot into the air every day. If the transportation agencies will spend $70 million for 250 trucks, what would they spend for the more than 2,500 trucks ruining the quality of life of Moorpark? If The Times will write a 52-line editorial for 2,500 trucks, how much will it write for solving the plight of a city impacted by more than 10 times that amount? And while everyone is so concerned about the quality of life of our Ventura County citizens, perhaps they could consider a State Road 34 bypass around my little town of Somis, which certainly has more than 250 trucks per day coursing through it.

I believe that the transportation agencies are not so much interested in preserving the residents’ quality of life as they are in building more roads and preserving their empires. After all, if the classic Los Angeles pattern of more roads generating more sprawl, leading to more traffic, leading to the need for even more roads, is broken, there won’t be as much need for the road-building bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, the agencies’ need to build roads and the developers’ need for access via roads forms a synergy that perpetuates Los Angeles sprawl to the detriment of everyone. The politicians’ need for pork barrel projects to hand out just adds taxpayers’ vast funds to lubricate the system.

Incidentally, Ventura County already has four times the miles of freeways and highways per capita as Los Angeles County. When will enough be enough?

JOHN F. KERKHOFF, Somis