Here are your responses to this week’s Q-Line question: “If you ran the show here, how would you make Santa Monica better?”
Check out Monday’s paper for a new Q-Line question! ■“I have two suggestions to try and alleviate the massive numbers of homeless people in Santa Monica. First, I would contact Mayor [Rudolph] Guiliani, the former mayor of New York, and employ him as a consultant. He seemed to have been able to solve the same problem in New York City. My second suggestion is to those people who feed the homeless — that they set up their tables not in the best tourist area where seeing all the drunks and bums deters tourism. The tables should be set up outside City Hall where they used to be fed a few years ago.” ■ “Santa Monica could alleviate traffic congestion today with some easy steps from nearby L.A. UCLA now subsidizes free Big Blue Bus travel for students — an experiment which the UCLA Daily Bruin says has saved at least some 1,300 parking spaces from being filled. Overnight, Santa Monica College Oversight Committee (see managing the money, April 29) could extend some of its new $160 million to the Blue Bus to subsidize SMC bus travel on the Big Blue and also an act of paving moratorium of parking structures for SMC. We will have cleaner air, less traffic congestion, and the money will come back to Santa Monica instead of going to the out to the SUV gas guzzle industry. Money could be spent on education instead of the boring idea of more parking structures.” ■ “As far as the homeless is concerned, it’s really sad that in this country of such affluence and such waste, that people should be living and sleeping on the streets. This whole problem started from the top, and the top should be taking care of all this. Meaning, the federal government. As far as the traffic, it’s horrendous at certain times! I don’t what the answer is to that one. I just don’t know.” ■ “It must be seen as completely inane to narrow the streets and prevent right hand turns while having development happen along the corridors that increase traffic. To increase traffic and then narrow the streets is completely non-sensical. One would think that if you’re going to increase development you would, in commercial spaces for the tax base, allow the traffic to flow. We are also surrounded by a huge megalopolis that demands we drive our cars. You can’t turn back the clock and make it a pedestrian community. There isn’t transportation to go to Dodgers games, the lumber yard, public parks, and schools. The concept of narrowing the streets and preventing people from making a right or left hand turn without a signal completely compounds the problem. Somebody ought to file a lawsuit, because it certainly dirties up the air while people sit in long lines, exhaust fuming from their cars, waiting to make a right hand turn.” ■ “First, fire everyone that has anything to do with traffic management in the city government. Second, bring back the one way streets and the lanes that have been eliminated over the last three years. Third, time the stoplights so you don’t have to stop at every one.” ■ “Santa Monica needs to get a whole new traffic department and a new engineer to make the traffic better in the downtown area. Since they took the left hand turn out of the Promenade and the Santa Monica Place on Colorado it’s become a nightmare down there. They also only let two cars make a left hand turn from 4th Street onto Colorado. It used to be about seven or eight. They really need someone to go down there and do a new study to see how traffic should flow. And the homeless... if we stopped feeding the homeless and letting them sleep on the sidewalks in the downtown area we might get rid of some of them.” ■“I’ve noticed that on Main Street and Ocean Park there are a lot of people who seem to be out of luck and have to panhandle. I just kind of wish that somebody would come over to them and ask them if they need help in getting on some sort of welfare or government program. In regards to the traffic, there should be less people using cars during the day. There should be more people using bicycles.” ■ “If I ran the show I would stop the wasted spending of Santa Monica dollars for things such as speed bumps, those dental mirror looking street lights and other projects that are basically an expenditure of funds that could be better used if we are going to keep homeless to feed them and house them and other things of that nature. In any case too much money is being spent on frivolous silly things such as the $150,000 wave over Santa Monica on Wilshire over by Franklin.” ■ “My first priority would be getting rid of the city council and mayor. Hopefully Veritas will be been voted in. Get rid of the homeless sleeping on the streets and bus benches. Stop feeding them in the Palisades Park. I would stop voting on all these inane ordinances and improve the traffic and stop tearing up the streets. Especially downtown. This is not conducive to bringing people in to shop in Santa Monica. I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen such a mess.” ■ “I think we need one unit where the homeless can go to live, wash, eat, sleep, and learn a trade. I would have employers come to this particular establishment, offering jobs. Day labor as well. The trades we need to teach these people are trades that they could handle anywhere else in the world. This is a warm climate and people who are homeless are going to come here. If they have skills they can use anywhere, like computer skills, they can go anywhere. They might even want to leave.” ■ “One thing that might help with the traffic problem would be to build the pier ramp that they have been talking about and get some of the traffic off the city streets straight onto PCH.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 3, 2002. Read the original PDF.