Rough Ride for Freeway Improvement Plan

Re “L.A. Lists 260 Ways to Help the 101,” July 17: Spending money to establish trifling improvements that will do little to attenuate our traffic problem will prove wasteful and unproductive.

Without spending billions to build and/or expand freeways, we can make driving tolerable if we reduce the number of vehicles on our roads. Rationing permission to drive only on alternate days will make carpooling almost compulsory. This plan would cost net-zero and could be implemented in a matter of weeks. On restricted days, those who find carpooling impractical would use public transportation. This would generate a huge increase in available equipment and provide shorter waits, more routes and more profit for the MTA.

Otherwise, in a few years our exploding population will bring concomitant vehicles by the millions. The chaos would be unimaginable.

We need a public authority to consider this feasible solution.

Louis M. Neumark

Tarzana

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The city’s new plan to improve traffic flow on the 101 is an insult to every working resident of the San Fernando Valley. The most telling sentence in the article states that the plan was not forged by traffic engineers but by community groups that oppose widening the freeway. Instead, they believe that adding buses, planting more trees, improving street signs and lengthening turning lanes will improve traffic. What a joke.

I am so fed up with council members such as Tom LaBonge who are too timid to take the obvious steps necessary to enable working people to get to their jobs.

Miriam Janousek

Studio City