Opinion: LA Should Reject ‘Misguided’ Car-Centric Policies

In a piece in Streetsblog Los Angeles, Wes Reutimann argues that plans to expand roadways in Los Angeles County will only exacerbate the air quality problems the region already faces. “Yet Metro and Caltrans are still moving forward with plans to expand highways across LA, in a fruitless effort to ‘relieve congestion’ once and for all.”

Reutimann points out that those plans will disproportionately affect communities along major freeways that are already some of the nation’s most polluted. “According to the CA Air Resources Board’s 2017 Scoping Plan, we will neither reach our air quality nor our climate goals unless we reduce how much we drive. Seven years later we have yet to align our transportation spending with science.”

Reutimann suggests that Metro and Caltrans could make better use of existing highway footprints to add tolled or HOV lanes and spend the savings on maintenance and multimodal projects. “Given everything we know now, more pollution, displacement, and destruction cannot still be an option. As L.A. prepares to host what’s touted as the greenest Olympic Games yet, the Metro Board should turn the page on this history of misguided, myopic, and auto-centric transportation planning.”