Letters: ‘Calming’ won’t make Westside traffic go away

Re “Traffic ‘calming’ brings storm of protest in Palms,” Aug. 14

I was interested in L.A. Department of Transportation spokesman Jonathan Hui’s comment on the public’s reaction to the traffic “calming” at the corner of Motor Avenue and National Boulevard near Cheviot Hills. He said: “It’s a balance of conflicting interests.”

Really? I think it’s more about the power that wealthy homeowners seem to have over City Hall. The congestion in their neighborhoods obviously takes precedence over less well-off areas.

Those of us who reside in “other” areas are still waiting for that speed bump and patrol car and now have the extra traffic that this “calming” created.

Genie Saffren

Los Angeles

In the early 2000s, community leaders, traffic planners, developers and city politicians agreed on a precedent-setting plan to deal with West L.A. traffic accessing Century City from the 10 and 405 freeways. Cars would be directed away from once-quiet residential neighborhood streets like Motor Avenue, which were never designed to handle overwhelming numbers of cars, and instead toward largely commercial arterial streets like National, which would be improved with new state-of-the-art traffic signals.

Paid for largely by Century City developers, not the taxpayers, the plan has helped to greatly mitigate West L.A.’s horrendous traffic problems.

The front-page article focusing on a single intersection makes this balanced, regional plan appear as a rich-versus-poor issue. It is not.

Carlyle Hall

Los Angeles

I wonder what the turning restrictions at the National and Motor intersection would be if they affected a middle- to low-income neighborhood rather than affluent Cheviot Hills.

I grew up in the low-brow area just north of the Rancho Park golf course and west of the Fox Studios, and Motor has always been a well-traveled street. If you bought a house on Motor and did not know that, you did not do your homework.

Ed Freeman

Moorpark

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