More Freeways, No Foresight

Re “More Time Going Nowhere” (Aug. 15):

I am a 71-year-old native Southern Californian and I remember the slow emergence of home construction to the east of Los Angeles in the early 1950s. At the time, a neighbor of ours in East Whittier asked if we had heard of the Mission Viejo area to the north and west of San Juan Capistrano with the suggestion it was an area in which to invest in land. Our response was it was too isolated to be a practical commute other than to Santa Ana.

But it did become practical here and in the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino. The immediate answer to commuting was to build freeways but to do so in the absence of a master plan for transportation. Municipalities, boards of supervisors, the state did not look beyond the use of freeways, could not overcome politics, to accommodate the vehicle saturation created by massive residential construction over hundreds of square miles.

What a dreadful shame we are going nowhere while at the same time we are destroying our environment. What a dreadful shame the last quote of the story will no doubt come to pass: “Eventually, you get to a point where the transportation system can’t handle it anymore. Eventually people will reach the point where they can’t endure the commute anymore and they just won’t make the commute for jobs here.”

ZANE W. DE ARAKAL

Irvine