Southland’s Workaday Motorists Are Street-Wise Too

Dear Street Smart:

I want to make a comment on Street Smart--or this week I should call it Street Stupid--by Eric Bailey. I think you ought to be replaced for a week by Frank Ellis of Los Alamitos, who wrote a very intelligent letter (May 28) about bike-riding behind cars with tinted glass. I think every one of your answers are very weak and illogical.

Suggesting, for example, that bicycles swing wider to miss the car door of vehicles with tinted glass suggests that there is no traffic on the street. It sounds like it’s better to get run over by traffic from behind. Is that what you mean?

As for your suggestion about not following cars with tinted glass, and making the analogy to following trucks that you can’t see around, it sounds like the problem disappears when it disappears for you. But, unfortunately, the problem is still there for motorists on the road who might not be as smart as you.

So I think in this case you’ve struck out with some very weak answers. So why don’t you take a vacation and let Mr. Ellis take the column over for a week?

Ralph Leighton

Montebello

Boy oh boy, what an offer! But I don’t think my boss would go for the idea of a vacation after seeing your letter, unless it was someplace cheery like Alcatraz or the middle of the Sahara sans canteen.

Yes, Mr. Ellis wrote a very intelligent letter, which certainly makes him a candidate to author this column. As I’ve found during my tenure as the Dr. Chuckhole of The Times, the real experts are generally the workaday folks forced to struggle through the gridlock each day.

Without again sounding Street Dumb, let me try to clarify the points I was attempting to make in response to Frank Ellis’ letter.

I certainly do not advocate bike riders veering so far into traffic that they get run over. But cyclists can generally steer far enough away from parked cars to miss any doors that swing open and still stay out of the path of that semi-truck in the slow lane.

As for my advice that motorists pull around cars with dark-tinted windows, it was meant simply as one man’s opinion. Obviously, it would be nice in such situations if the car up ahead didn’t have the tint, but the reality is that they’re out there so you’ve got to deal with ‘em. For me, that means getting into another lane if possible so I can see a bit farther ahead than the car just in front of me.

Dear Street Smart:

When you get on the car-pool lane, why don’t they tell you what the name of the next exit is? When you get on, you don’t know where you’re going to be able to get off until you’re on top of the next exit, and sometimes you’re forced to miss it.

Priscilla Silver

Santa Ana

This has happened to me on more than one occasion. Luckily, help is already at hand.

In recent months, small signs have been installed along the median strip on some stretches of the car-pool lanes in Orange County that notify motorists when they should exit the lane to get off at a particular freeway exit. These signs are on a 10-mile section of the San Diego Freeway south of the Corona del Mar Freeway and have also been erected at about half a dozen spots on the Costa Mesa Freeway.

During the coming months, the signs will be installed at each entrance and exit point of the car-pool lane, according to Joe El-Harake, Orange County commuter lanes coordinator for the California Department of Transportation. In addition, small signs will be installed in the median strip announcing when a motorist is a quarter-mile away from the next car-pool lane exit, he said.

Street Smart has some good news about the overzealous tree that was blocking a sign on Katella Avenue that announces the northbound on-ramp to the Costa Mesa Freeway. After Anita Freedman wrote to alert us to the problem (June 4), Caltrans went ahead and pruned the tree so motorists can get a peek at the sign before they’re right on top of the on-ramp.

But there is more good news. Caltrans officials, acknowledging that they can’t stop the offending tree from growing back over the sign, say they plan to relocate the placard several hundred feet farther up the road to a spot in the center median where it will be more visible to motorists.

The relocation, which is planned for the coming week, should please Freedman, who complained that the sign is too close to the on-ramp to permit the unindoctrinated time to veer into the correct lane.