Silent on the issue...

Steve Hymon's new column takes on the Presidential candidates for talking more about traffic:

What could a president of the United States really do to improve your commute? The question resonates in Southern California, the longtime champion of primal-scream traffic. In recent years, the issue has been pretty much left up to local and state pols and their ever-shrinking pots of money. If you can read this while driving today, then you know what a great job they've done. But there was a day when getting around town was a presidential concern. It reached its nexus in 1956 when President Eisenhower, still irked over a slow cross-country drive decades earlier, signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act.

Wired.com likes where Steve is coming from.

PHOTO: LAT

Comments

[Dan W.]

Newsflash: The golden age of the L.A. "car culture" is forever behind us. With millions more predicted to arrive in So. Cal. over the next few decades, Los Angeles is only going to get more vertical, more dense and more in need of public transit. In order to maintain Los Angeles' sustainability both economically and environmentally, we will have to invest as heavily in public transit infrastructure over the next five decades as we invested in roads and freeways over the last five. The limits of sprawl have been reached. The variables that enabled the "car culture", namely open space, cheap gasoline, and fewer people no longer exist. There's no turning the clock back and restoring the quality of the single-occupancy motoring lifestyle. Sorry. Caltrans couldn't do it even with unlimited resources.

The party's over. We can no longer subsidize the infamous L.A. "car culture" sense of automobile entitlement to drive and park anytime, anyplace, anywhere cheaply, swiftly and conveniently. Los Angeles in 30 years will look very different than it does now. No more wasting taxpayer money on expanding roads and freeways in a futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable. Money needs to be used to maintain the existing road system we have and investing in mass transit.