View 683 Sunday, July 17, 2011
Happy Anniversary, Roberta.
The national news has been full of the story: the California Department of Transportation, CALTRANS, having decided to spend a billion dollars adding car pool lanes to the 405 Freeway, had to close the 405 for the weekend. The 405 is the main north-south exchange, through Sepulveda Pass. It connects the main part of Los Angeles with the San Fernando Valley and parts north. For weeks there have been warnings of Carmageddon, Doom, Death, and Destruction. The world’s greatest traffic jam. And so forth.
In fact nothing happened. Like the “Day without Illegals” in which all the illegal aliens were supposed to stay home, in an “Atlas Shrugged” sort of demonstration on how necessary they were to the economy, the freeways were clear, traffic was light, and it was a fairly pleasant weekend.
Bob Holmes sums it up nicely:
Carmageddon and Y2K
Jerry,
Now that the South half of the Mulholland Drive Bridge is down and the 405 Freeway has reopened about 18 hours earlier than planned we will undoubtedly hear from the usual suspects that the fears of massive traffic jams were overblown and all that planning and fear mongering was not necessary.
These are the same folks that hsve been saying that the Y2K fears were nothing but a big scam. After all none of the horrible things that we were warned about actually happened.
Same folks with the irrational fears of Nuclear Power, Food Irradiation and many other very safe things thst, in fact, save lives.
Once again, as in Y2K, excellent planning and execution have made a potentially very difficult or possibly disastrous event a non-occurance.
Why is it that the idiots seem to have the loudest voices?
Bob Holmes
Forewarned is forearmed, and planning for impending problems can often mitigate them. Be Prepared is no bad motto.
To Arms! To Arms!
Three Arms! Four Arms!
Besides, forearmed is forewarned!
That will only make sense to Pogo fans, and not all of them.
Of course if it were left to me, I’d put the billion dollars they’re spending into paying down some of the debt. We don’t need car pool lanes, which won’t be used – Los Angeles employment patterns are such that carpooling is very difficult to arrange – and we do need to have the deficit reduced. But that’s another story.
Colonel Ted Fehrenbach wrote This Kind of War, the best work I know of on the Korean War; it’s also one of the necessary works to read when contemplating military philosophy, on the same list with Cameron’s Anatomy of Military Merit. He has done a short piece on the last Shuttle and the American manned space program that is well worth your time.
