Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.
Valiant: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon – for this freeway? I don’t get it.
Doom: (smugly) Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off. Off and on. All day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly-prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
Gee whiz. Back in January, I suggested that the Obama administration – if it’s serious about infrastructure investment and breaking through long disputes – might finish a Southern California freeway link that’s been in the works for a half century. For that crime, I was savagely, personally (and inaccurately) attacked as some kind of 21st century Judge Doom from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
To read the commentary about my Fox & Hounds column, you might have thought I’d suggested cutting down rain forest, or running a road through a state park. Instead, what I suggested was the completion of the 710 link, which abruptly ends in Alhambra, six miles short of where it’s supposed to end – in Pasadena. This isn’t a particularly radical or controversial idea, except for those who seem to think the community in the link’s way — South Pasadena – is sacred ground.
South Pasadena isn’t actually threatened by completion of the link. Caltrans is studying building the road as a tunnel, which I favor. Even if the freeway was above ground, which I wouldn’t oppose but don’t believe is politically viable, the property in the path of the freeway was bought up by the state in the 1960s. In fact, voters in Alhambra and Pasadena – which have seen more traffic because of the failure to complete the freeway – have endorsed it. This is a classic case of a small entity – South Pasadena – blocking the longstanding plans of an entire region.
But you wouldn’t know that to listen to the commentary.
It started with Kevin Roderick’s blog, La Observed, with the highly inflammatory and misleading headline, "Should Obama Break South Pasadena?" I don’t want to break South Pas and never wrote that. Roderick said I was an "advocate." (I’m not an advocate of the freeway or of anything else for that matter. I’m not part of any campaign. I’m a journalist with a column on a web site, trying to make an argument).
Roderick suggested I was demanding Obama take my side. (I don’t have a side – if folks never want to build the 710 link, fine with me.) He called my view a "narrow SoCal position" – my position wasn’t narrow or SoCal. I was making the broad argument that if the Obama administration is serious about its big promises of pushing forward a long-delayed project that has broad support, this is the kind of thing the administration should push. It’s been part of federal plans and state plans, and has been endorsed over and over again by most of the local communities (with the obvious exception of South Pasadena, which has fought it in the courts for more than 30 years). The problem, of course, is that every infrastructure project faces strong opposition from some neighborhood or community. If you’re serious about building infrastructure, you’ll face opposition even from projects that are justified and long in the planning.
Roderick also suggested I was doing special pleading for Pasadena, where I grew up, but haven’t lived since I was a high school senior in 1991. South Pasadena, he concluded, is some sort of transit paradise (I suppose because of the lightly used Gold line), and the sort of place we should be supporting. I’m not aware of South Pasadena being any more committed to mass transit than Pasadena, which also has the Gold Line and a fantastic bus system.
Provoked by Roderick, environmental blogs piled on. Lastreetsblog.com suggested I was calling for an above-ground link. I’m not. The blog also suggested the road would "devastate" downtown South Pasadena. How exactly? The blog suggested that the locals opposed it. No, South Pasadena opposes it. The other neighboring cities – larger than South Pas, by the way – have voted to support it.
I almost felt responsible, until I remembered that this link was first planned in 1949 – 24 years before I was born.
Why does any of this matter? The controversy over the stimulus package is still white-hot. The nation has huge needs in terms of roads, highways and bridges, but the package is light on infrastructure. The attacks on my little old Fox & Hounds Daily post are a demonstration of why. There’s a strong anti-road strain in Democratic environmentalism: all roads are bad, freeways are especially bad, and to suggest that one be completed is evil.
I must admit, I share some of that attitude. New freeway construction has encouraged sprawl. We need to invest much more in public transit – really in transportation infrastructure of all kinds. But we have a president who has called for road and bridge building as part of a promise to rebuild America. He’s also talked about getting past knotty problems. The 710 link fits both.
At the very least, the Obama administration might push for a resolution to this dispute once and for all. Right now, we’re halfway there. Planning for the link continues. Freeway signs all over the Southland indicate that the 710 Freeway goes to Pasadena. Property in the path of the link is in state hands, rather than private hands. In Pasadena, there’s a stretch of freeway – and a big hole in the ground – where the link would connect with the 210. In Alhambra, there’s an ugly deadend at Valley Boulevard.
The bottom line: Kill it or build it. A half-century of limbo is enough.