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Let's Meet at City Hall - Wed Aug 28!
 | | Labonge proposes a fleet of City Vans join Tourist Vans up and down Beachwood to help hikers and tourists find their way into Beachwood. |
Our Councilmember, Tom Labonge, has introduced a Council motion for a fleet of vans to shuttle tourists from Hollywood and Vine (the Red Line Station) up Beachwood to the Hollyridge Trail. With tourists walking in the middle of the street and traffic at gridlock much of the time on upper Beachwood, can you imagine vans going up and down, for example, every ten minutes, passing one another? The gridlock of this summer will be viewed fondly in comparison. Tom Labonge is obviously tone deaf to our pleas to quell the invasion of tourists into our neighborhoods.
There is a rational alternative. It is to have the tourists travel directly to Griffith Park via the Fern Dell entrance which does not go through any of our neighborhoods. A shuttle bus connecting the Western Avenue Metro station to the intersection of Mount Hollywood Drive and Observatory Avenue would deposit the tourists to a nearby trail head from which visitors could get the iconic Hollywood Sign photo with themselves in it. See the BCNA web site http://www.thehollywoodsign.org/2011/09/mt-hollywood-drive-hike/ for details.
Another ideas that should be studied is the possibility of creating a new 1200 foot trail with a gentle slope following the contour of the hillside starting from the existing trail head on Western Canyon Road leading directly to the ideal picture spot. (see photo) This would reduce the driving and walking distance and would link the existing trails to the road.
Carpooling
Neighbors are carpooling to the Transportation Committee meeting scheduled for this coming Wednesday Aug 28th at 2 pm.
Let's meet in the Village at 1 pm.
Can you be a driver? We'll have plenty of riders showing up!
BeachwoodCanyon@sbcglobal.net
Transportation Meeting Agenda
It's Mathematics
If Tom Labonge's plan is designed to take folks off the street, he may need an expert to do the numbers within a feasibility study. Beachwood Drive is filled with pedestrians, some tourists and some regular hikers. The tourist and resident cars compete with these folks. The plan is to use vans that carry ten persons at a time from the Red Line Station at Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St.
To make a dent in replacing the existing foot traffic, it will take MANY van trips happening often. This would require (obviously) more than one or two vans. To make a difference (if that is possible), the City would have to buy many vans and they would have to run often up and down Beachwood. They would be competing with pedestrian traffic that may not want to ride the vans. They may not know about the vans. They may be routine hikers.
So, you have Beachwood filled with the routine tourist traffic, residential traffic, pedestrian traffic and now a fleet of vans passing one another trying to fit through this maze. Gridlock at the top of Beachwood could be made worse by the frequent van trips turning around at the top. Does this pencil out for anyone - Bueller?
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