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Health & Fitness

The Traffic Tsunami

Will "development at any cost" lead to a Traffic Tsunami for Lake Forest?

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City staff are conducting a “traffic calming” workshop Wednesday night at the City Hall at 7 pm to address the growing concerns of the citizens in Portola Hills who are worried that their way of life will be seriously disrupted when a new housing development of nearly 1,000 new homes (and 10,000 square feet of commercial space) is squeezed into open space around Glenn Ranch Rd. This “workshop” follows a meeting in July at which dozens of people (myself included) spoke and offered serious doubts about the adequacy of the Environmental Impact Report that was being used as the basis for the rationale for going ahead with this project.

You can read about the project by clicking here

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You can read my comments following the July meeting by clicking

The Portola Center project is the tip of the spear for a multi-year multi-million dollar thrust that will bring nearly 3,000 new homes and 10,000 new people, and tens of thousands of new cars into our city. Imagine that. On your way to work tomorrow morning, imagine where we will fit another 20,000 cars in our city. Or the next time you go to the Post Office, imagine sharing the parking lot and the waiting line with dozens of more people.

The plain fact is that new homes not only bring new people and their cars, it also brings the cars, vans, and trucks that service those people. It also brings the people who come to visit the new residents.

Consider the gardeners who are ubiquitous in our city. If a gardener can take care of a single home in an hour (including the time it takes to come and go and set up), then one gardener can service about 50 homes in a week, assuming he’s fully occupied, which is rare. So for every 1,000 new homes, we’ll have about 20 new trucks roaming our streets. It’s the same thing for the postman, the UPS delivery, the water trucks, the meter readers, the repairmen, the sales people, the newspaper deliveries, etc.

Everybody knows that traffic is already a problem. When people are asked what they don’t like about Lake Forest, the #1 choice is “traffic congestion”. Traffic has been the #1 problem facing the city since 2002, after the El Toro Airport issue was finally settled.

And, quite frankly, the City doesn’t have a great track record in dealing with the traffic problem. The Alton Parkway extension was delayed forever and was finally finished a few months ago. Our traffic lights are still not fully synchronized so you can rarely go a few blocks without stopping for a light. There are many intersections where traffic backs up for half a block or more. Etc.

So if traffic is our #1 problem, and if we don’t exactly have a great track record in dealing with this problem, how on earth can you justify adding tens of thousands of new cars into our city?

The meeting tomorrow night is for the Portola Center project, but if this project moves forward, it will impact everyone in Lake Forest. We need to put a temporary moratorium on new housing developments until we solve the existing problems.

I’m not a Troglodyte. I’m not one of those anti-development advocates. But I don’t believe in “development at any cost” either. There is a time and place for everything, and right now with all our traffic problems, is not time to be adding tens of thousands of new cars to our already beleaguered city.

There are powerful forces aligned against us. Developers (including Baldwin and USA Portola Properties who are behind this project) have already “greased the wheels” by giving thousands of dollars to city council members. Developers, construction companies, consulting companies, and a host of others stand to make millions if these projects go ahead. Of course, very few, if any, of them live in Portola Hills, or in Lake Forest, so they won’t feel the impact of these projects, except in their pocket books. 

What can you do?

  • Come to the city hall meeting.
  • Put up a comment and tell us what traffic problem annoys you the most.
  • Write to the City Council and ask them to halt the new housing developments until we solve our existing traffic problems.

 

If we act now we can stop the Traffic Tsunami which will inevitably head our way. Development can be a good thing, but not "at any cost".

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