Traffic Gridlock coming our way soon!

On 25th February, MB City Council approved, on a 3 to 2 vote, to move forward on widening the bridge on Sepulveda over the greenbelt. This will cause traffic gridlock for over two years. This is a $21.5  million project. Manhattan Beach pays about $4 million of that. Averaged over our population this is $651 dollars for every man woman and child in MB or only $121 if you only count our cost part. The idea is to get a 4th lane going north on the bridge. Right now there is 7 full lanes over the bridge, a center lane for turning and 3 regular lanes each way. This is exactly the same situation all the way south to Horondo when PCH narrows to 2 traffic lanes each way.

The first of two main selling points was, even though the bridge has been declared perfectly safe, some want an incredibly high standard; they want to protect us from stars falling on us and bombs exploding in our faces. There are bridges all over the world, longer, less well built and certainly less secure. The security of the bridge is not the issue but staff has skillfully focused on the fact that it is not at current seismic standards, a standard most buildings of any kind fail. Lets suppose there is merit to earthquake retrofitting the bridge. There are approximately 9320 cubic yards of open space under the bridge. Reclaimed gravel can be gotten for around $8.5 per cubic yard. So the bridge can be filled in for around $80,000 in materials without disturbing traffic in any way. Now lets put a nice 45 degree dirt slope on each side and cover it with nice water resistant brush. Reasonable this all could be done for around $200,000, or 1% of the projected cost. It will also be very pretty and will get rid of the homeless problem under the bridge and be even more secure than what is being proposed. Staff also lied to council, telling them that the sidewalks were 4 and 4.5 feet wide. They are 5 feet. How could good engineers not measure this correctly. They also lied about the lanes narrowing and not being to standard and traffic being cosy over the bridge. All of the lanes are exactly 3 meters, all the way to Horondo.

The other big issue is a perceived danger going north on the intersection of 33 and Sepulveda. The notion that the road narrows there and is a danger is being proposed. The road does not narrow except to traffic violators who leave a “turn only into the mall” lane and illegally make a change of lanes to the left. Was there data to support this? Not really, but data was skillfully selected to misguide the council. I thought the job of our staff at council was to properly appraise council. The standard used to show this was “accidents per 1 Million Vehicle Miles”. Does anyone have a clue what that means? The traffic engineer said that by that standard the segment from 33rd to Rosecrans including 33 and Rosecrans had a slightly higher traffic accident rate that the rest of Sepulveda. He cleverly failed to say that the traffic accident rate there was lower that the average for all of California. The truth is, on that stretch over 3 years, there were 31 fender benders (no serious accidents). 14 were on south bound traffic, which bridge widening will not affect. Most of the remaining 17 probably were at the extremely busy Rosecrans/Sepulveda intersection, not affected by bridge widening. Some of the few remaining might be from traffic turning into Sepulveda either from the mall or from 33rd street. Bridge widening will not affect this since these occur on a light with little traffic. We will never know the truth since the traffic engineer skillfully veered away from all enlightenment. Our two shining stars in all of this were councilors Mark Burton and Eric D'Errico who reasonable argued that the answer was to make the east lane starting at Marine going north be make exit only all the way to 33rd street. The idea behind this is, some people will get into this lane not realizing it will become an exit only lane, then have to change lanes into busy traffic late. This is a very simple and elegant solution and costs nothing.

This project is now likely to happen and we will be subject to traffic jams for at least two years because of this. I think we should thank councilors Mark Burton and Eric D'Errico who tried to buck the establishment to save our residents from traffic jams, wasted money, and fruitless endeavors. We should also adopt their simple elegant solution to this, making the east lane exit only from Marine to 33rd street. We can also fill under the bridge, beautify the area, get rid of the homeless problem and all for 1% of the cost without causing any traffic gridlock.