710 Tunnel on Tomorrow’s MTA Meeting Agenda; “Houses and Tunnels” Under the Paperweight 2

Item 55 on the April 22, 2010 MTA Board meeting agenda includes a motion by MTA Directors John Fasana and Gloria Molina to remove all zones except zone 3 for 710 Tunnel Project consideration, in a bid to move that option forward in the study stage.

Tunnel project opponents have been following developments, trying at every turn to stop the project before it becomes “shovel-ready.” As Sierra Madre blog The Tattler puts it:

A word you hear a lot of these days is “process.” The concept of “process” is usually trotted out when something particularly unpopular is being marketed to a hostile public…What this is really all about is holding off a skeptical public long enough to get the planning and set-up in place, then allowing the citizens to have their say, but only after everything is pretty much shovel ready. The ensuing pitch being that since everything is ready to go, and it really is such a wonderful plan that involved vast sums of money and a whole lot of time to create, why would you ever want to stop it now? Killing off an unpopular planning initiative is always easier in the early stages then it is after there is something tangible and complete to market to the citizens.

And nowhere is the “process” more evident than in that slowly creeping inevitability known as the 710 Freeway Tunnel. This boondoggle (present cost estimate $3.73 billion), would close the gap between the Foothill (210) and Long Beach (710) freeways. The years of successful opposition in South Pasadena to the completion of this project having literally driven it underground.

The Tattler’s full post, under the Sunroom Desk paperweight, considers transit-oriented development policy and the contradictions of a 21st century freeway tunnel as an answer to regional gridlock, even within the constituency promoting it. Another excerpt:

Since one of the Sacramento mandated goals of SCAG is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the San Gabriel Valley through the building of high-density housing, which will supposedly cut down on automobile traffic, it seems odd that they would also be advocating the creation of a tunnel that would undo any of the purported good effects of all that development. A bit of a contradiction, as it were.