LAist on Olympico: It's "a freeway, stupid!"

Writing in the popular LAist blog, Kemp Powers weighs in with a piece called Love is not a one-way street. From the article:

Q: What do you call a road with five to seven lanes of traffic in one direction, if the only way to exit this road is by going to the right?

Pose that question to most Angelenos and the answer would be "a freeway, stupid!" But they'd be wrong. The answer is the increasingly popular proposal by LA County Supervisor Zev Yarolslavsky to convert Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way streets in order to ease Westside traffic. The proposal has been hailed as an easy quick fix in recent articles and on the news after a report by former LADOT planner Allyn Rifkin declared a reconfigured Olympic and Pico would cut traffic by 20 percent, as long as the one-way streets prohibited all left turns for their entire 14-mile span. With left-hand turns allowed, the traffic decrease could be a significantly lower 6 percent. Whoop-dee-damn-doo.

Powers is an Eastsider with little sympathy for what he sees as the self-inflicted traffic woes of the Westside.

The most upsetting component of one-way proponents' arguments for the one-way configuration is that they believe the “Subway to the Sea” is a nice idea, but can’t be built fast enough to solve traffic problems now. Let’s see, Yaroslavsky (along with Rep. Henry Waxman) helped kill the subway extension back in the 90s (which is why the recently-renamed Purple Line stops so abruptly at Wilshire and Western) by banning use of sales tax revenues for subway construction. Then, years later, after traffic has spiraled out of control and the Westside is a giant overpriced parking lot, the same guys vote to repeal the ban.

But now, the construction time of the subway is waaay too long to wait and the cost is waaay too high. Hasn’t anyone stopped to think that if not for the very same NIMBYism that put the Westside into its traffic funk, it would be possible to hop onto a subway today and coast under Wilshire Blvd. all the way to Santa Monica, passing under Beverly Hills (getting its ass kicked by The Grove), Westwood (choking to death on traffic exhaust) and the 405 (no comment necessary)?

Powers also notes that the primary opposition is in Koreatown, where an Olympic Freeway would "slice through the heart" of the community.