Anyone notice how much more of our city traffic seems to be going from west to east than east to west? We have added thousands of new housing units downtown and little traffic mitigation measures to keep up with this accelerated growth. Corresponding with this rapid change, we have seen shipping and cargo at our Port of Long Beach growing geometrically. We also know that the financial benefit derived from the port has been what has kept our city and its employment base at the forefront of our economic prosperity.
This however has caused the I-710 or Long Beach Freeway, as we may better know it, as a veritable no-mans land for passenger cars. We all wisely avoid it due to the thousands of trucks that daily fill its three lanes. So it is no wonder that all these new folks that have come downtown to call Long Beach home drive to the east end of the city looking for the I-405 or I-605 to get to LA and avoid the onslaught of truck traffic they would ordinarily encounter on what used to be the quickest route out of town, the I-710.
The solution to this dilemma is fixing the Long Beach Freeway. The old fellow was built in 1954 and is functionally obsolete. There has been a lot of preliminary work done up to now but we just can’t slog along and expect that waiting 10 years is acceptable.
The governor and the people supported a massive infrastructure bond that recently passed, and I can only hope that we aggressively push our way around Sacramento and let our voices be heard.
Our city is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the region with our port and its thousands of jobs. Long Beach is the breadbasket of the Los Angeles region. We are entitled to get our fair share of transportation dollars to fix a mess that is only going to get worse before it gets better.