Monday, June 15, 2015

why has the 710 been left unfinished for 45 years?


the green dotted line is where there is no freeway, and it's all surface streets, and stop lights, and delays, to get to Pasadena.


I'm constantly baffled that the 110 and the 710 can't get across Alhambra and Pasadena, and get traffic moving between the 210 and the 10.

20% of the Los Angeles County population lives in the San Gabriel Valley and in the east/northeast of Los Angeles yet there is NO North and South freeway to connect the 10, the 210 and the 110.

In 2001, and 2006, the legal stuff was passed to get the road or tunnel completed. Nothing yet.

Once completed, the 710 tunnel will slash traffic clogging Alhambra streets by 61% and reduce 80,000 daily cut-through trips.

In March, Caltrans, in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Metro, released an environmental impact report detailing alternatives for closing the gap. 2,260 pages of it.  After years of bickering and speculation, the EIR was mandated by 2008’s Measure R, a successful ballot measure that earmarked $780 million for the 710 corridor.

Pasadena is clearly missing from the cities that support an effort to get the 710 completed. Guess why? Pasadena is the multi millionaire town, the one with enough clout and whose paid off enough govt types to have prevented any freeway from screwing up and going through their town

In a precursor to the rampant anti-freeway activism of the late 1960s and 1970s, the residents of upscale South Pasadena simply would not allow a freeway to disrupt, bisect and partially destroy their neighborhood. Whereas may low-income neighborhoods across the country raised the same concerns to no avail, South Pasadena’s affluence — it consists largely of stately single-family homes and has a median household income of $84,000 — enabled it to prevail.

South Pasadena Mayor Marina Khubesrian is the co-founder of the 5 Cities Alliance, which opposes the tunnel and has invoked such costly debacles as Boston’s Big Dig, which went over $10 billion over-budget, and Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct tunnel, which grappled with a halted boring machine.
http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/massive-freeway-tunnel-los-angeles-710-freeway

Monterey Park is one of the cities that form the 710 Coalition, a group of 5 pro-tunnel cities and organizations. In addition to Alhambra and Monterey Park, the 710 Coalition includes Rosemead, San Gabriel, and San Marino.

The No 710 Action Committee protested the event on Thursday, arguing that the project is expensive, unsafe, and does not prepare Alhambra and the San Gabriel Valley for the future. "It's not a solution. It's a $12 billion dollar truck tunnel that's suicidal,” said Joe Potts, a No 710 Action Committee member and South Pasadena resident.

http://www.alhambrasource.org/news/second-annual-710-day-alhambra-aims-close-gap


http://www.710coalition.com/

Of the report’s five options — from a legally required “no-build” alternative to a light-rail line to a busway — the one that has arguably received the most popular support involves a freeway-sized tunnel running uninterrupted for 4.9 miles under South Pasadena at depths of over 100 feet.

Transportation planners, civic leaders and, especially, cargo carriers in the Los Angeles region have long bemoaned the gap. Freeway traffic either spills out onto surface streets in Alhambra, or it crams onto other freeways, gumming up untold miles of the freeway grid and affecting, by some estimates, 200,000 drivers per day.

https://www.facebook.com/The710FreewayCoalition



http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Debate--Celebration--710-Freeway-Tunnel-Opposition--306825521.html

1 comment:

  1. Yep, Pasadena is packed full of liberals, and they all chant "Not In My Back Yard...Not In My Back Yard....."

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