A FREEWAY RUNS THROUGH IT
Say your neighbor intentionally cuts down a tree on his property and it falls on your house, making your house unlivable. Shouldn't he be responsible to make your house livable again? It was his tree and it was his action. Your house was just in the wrong place. How would you feel if your neighbor then said, tough nougies, it's your house so it's your problem?
That's a little like what's happening with the 55 abomination that ends in Costa Mesa's downtown.
At its regularly scheduled no-City Council meeting on 4/15, the no-City Council voted to spend $6,984,000 (mostly from Measure M funds) to, among other more minor things, speed up traffic along Newport Blvd. by adding a fourth lane northbound from 17th Street to north of 19th Street and a fourth lane southbound from the 55 to Broadway. LINK
A LITTLE REMINDER AND WHAT IT ALL MEANS
Years ago, the State of California wanted to make it easier for people to get from inland cities to beach cities, so they tried to build a major freeway--the 55 abomination--right through the center of downtown Costa Mesa. The 55, if it continued on its course through our downtown, would have effectively split the Eastside and the Westside of the city much as the 405 splits the city in the north.
Then, for a variety of reasons, including citizen complaints and lack of funding, the 55, as we all know, was stopped right by Triangle Square instead of going all the way into Newport Beach. That's where it is today. And, of course, by "stopped" we don't mean it really stopped. It just continued on in a narrower configuration called Newport Blvd.
So, in essence, and to put a point on this, we still have the 55 freeway through our downtown, but it's narrower and is called Newport Blvd. Because Newport Blvd. is narrower than the 55 and has crosswalks and many streets leading off it, we have troubling traffic problems in our downtown.
SO WHAT'S THE REAL PROBLEM?
Today, many people complain about all the traffic from the 55 in our downtown and they seem to think that the traffic is the problem. It's not. The traffic is just a symptom of the real problem.
The real problem is the 55 freeway. That's the problem that has to be fixed.
Folks, the 55 is NOT Costa Mesa's freeway. It belongs to the State of California. It is the state's problem that has been shifted to us. Like the guy in the tree example above, the state of California has said tough nougies to us, so now we're trying to fix the state's problem.
Most of the people who have attended recent workshops on what to do about the 55 say that it should be put underground down to Industrial Way and then come up to grade. That will make Costa Mesa whole once again and return our downtown to local traffic.
That's the only real solution to the 55 mess: put it underground and not let it split Costa Mesa in two.
This present move by the City Council to widen Newport Blvd. is not a solution to the real problem, it is an attempt to handle local complaints about traffic. All we're doing is twisting ourselves into pretzels to work around the 55 instead of demanding that the state find the money and the time to put the damn thing underground where it belongs. So, we hear talk about elevated crosswalks across the 55, and street widening, and new turn lanes, and traffic signal coordination. Folks, these are all bandaids.
And, these bandaids hide the real problem and the real solution and may cause many citizens to think the problem is solved and thus give up their activism to fix the real problem.
In addition, the present plan to widen Newport Blvd. will set a precedent so the state can come back in a couple of years and say there's no money to dig a tunnel, so Newport Blvd. will just have to be widened again, maybe to 6 lanes in each direction. A few more years, and it'll be widened to 8 lanes in each direction.
If the citizens of Costa Mesa don't demand a real solution to the problem--a tunnel--we're going to be split apart one little widening after another until we have a massive freeway right through the middle of our city that will be as wide and as fast as the 405.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
