By Stewart Resmer Santa Monica
In your editorial “Parallel Lines” (SMDP, March 10, page 4), you strike directly at the heart of the matter when you question the status of parking here in Santa Monica’s downtown district. It seems to me that when you describe what the people don’t want you perhaps forget that the new public safety building was voted down by the voters several years ago but then council overrode that vote and built the building at a cost disadvantage. The new, new, really, really, new library was another example of “we have revenues and we must build.” And it isn’t going to end there at all. Consider the dimension of the civic center village. Massive, over-arching, very pricey, to whose benefit? To what end? For what purpose?
Continue the accepted way of building of intersections and red lights from here to LAX during peak hours, gridlock the city, and one will have achieved nothing.
We have a great deal of parking at the beach already. Reduce those rates, create a new innovative exciting way to get there, and then another radical innovative conveyance from the beach to where it is people most likely want to go. Do this and you will have reinvented the city, and when you do, you will lead the world.
Ah, but these are the ramblings of a visionary, and stodgy government types don’t like dreamers, I suppose. So perhaps the solution lies in our dreams and not our accepted present disciplines.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 16, 2006. Read the original PDF.