Bridges, Bags and Broken Bonds

During the most recent several decades, area voters have been assured of certain improvements in infrastructure and environmental policy that haven’t exactly panned out as expected.

LAX People Mover

In 1990, rail leaders proposed a sales tax initiative to add more local revenue for public transit, including rail, which would ease traffic to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) via light rail along the Century Freeway.

Opened as part of the Green Line on Aug. 12, 1995, the Aviation/LAX station was named to highlight its proximity to the airport. However, it was proximity only, hardly the promised LAX people mover train. The idea of an LAX connection was scrapped and the Green Line train headed south. A shuttle bus connected this station to the airport.

The people mover part of the project was revived and is expected to be ready in 2005, thirty years after the Green Line passed it by, thirty years of unnecessary car, bus, shuttle and Uber trips. The excuse for the lack of an LAX connection is to blame budget and legal problems.

Alameda Corridor

In 1998, the $2.4 billion Alameda Corridor project from the harbor to rail yards east of downtown Los Angeles was intended to relieve the truck congestion on the Long Beach (710) Freeway and nearby surface streets. A spike in the volume coming into the ports has put even more trucks on the streets according to the L.A. Business Journal. After the completion of the project, backers denied they had pitched the project as congestion relief.

Dark Electronic Signs

As part of an expected need for traffic mitigation for the Douglas Park development, in 2010, five electronic signs were erected for traffic control, two each at Lakewood Boulevard and Carson Street and one sign at Cherry Avenue south of Cover Street. According to the city, none of the signs has been activated, remaining dark to this day. Cost from $107,000 to $131,000 for a $600,000 total, it’s unclear if they were financed by the city or by Boeing, or by both entities.

Plastic Bag Ban

As a way of eliminating the cost of free plastic bags, according to several grocery chain insiders, major supermarket groups met with environmentalists to mount a campaign against “single use” bags, even though such bags had secondary uses for pet waste and garbage disposal as stores had tired of offering free bags.

On New Year’s Day 2012, free plastic bags were banned from Long Beach grocery stores by a City Council “behavior modification” vote led by the ban’s chief proponent Suja Lowenthal. Spurred by Long Beach and other municipalities banning free bags, two years out, “single use” bags were banned statewide in legislation authored by now U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. Retailers were mandated to provide more durable “reusable” and recyclable bags at the checkout for at least 10 cents a pop.

More than four times thicker than the free bags, they were designed to be reused at least 125 times. After a few dozen uses, customers noted these bags became putrid, thus hardly usable. Most consumers got rid of them after several reuses at best, tossing them out in the trash. As no recycling facility in the state accepted these bags, they weren’t recyclable. Their increased thickness proved even a greater problem to the environment, a poorly thought-out idea to help an industry save a few bucks.

Int’l Gateway to Pasadena

On the newly completed Long Beach International Gateway Bridge (IGB) replacement for the 50-year-old Gerald Desmond Bridge, some of the anticipated benefits did not materialize.

In 2020, the IGB was expected to become “an icon for the city, right along with the Queen Mary. Everything else will be dwarfed in the city,” said then-Long Beach Harbor spokesman John Pope in 2014. In fact, the bridge cannot be seen from Ocean Boulevard before the bridge entry.

The former Desmond Bridge was two lanes of wide open traffic heading into Long Beach depositing commuters onto the broad expanse of Ocean Boulevard. It figured none of this would change. Change it did.

The mainline to downtown with the off-ramp to the 710 on the Desmond became a mainline route to the 710 on the IGB, with the redesigned downtown off-ramp using signage marking “Pico Ave. Downtown Pier A-J.” What downtown? Long Beach? Ocean Blvd? Pico Avenue?

This new design is the mirror opposite of the previous Desmond design in which the main two lanes emptied onto Ocean while the right side off ramp led to the 710. In essence, the mainline is the 710 with Pasadena as the destination while the off ramp takes the driver to “downtown,” city name not noted.

Staying on the three lane 18-wheeler sandwich called the 710, the earliest entrance into Long Beach is the bleak grittiness of Anaheim Street, with a prison-like fence separating the east and west lanes of traffic. Imagine an out-of-town tourist, stunned with the beauty of the bridge, suddenly confronted with traffic on the jam-packed 710 and the desolate Anaheim Street escape route. Is that Long Beach’s best look?

In fact, the 710 does not end in Pasadena as that freeway extension was never completed, instead peters out in Alhambra.