When assignments were handed out, Goran Eriksson emerged from the City Council’s all-day Strategic Planning Retreat last week with perhaps the most annoying, most common and most complex research to conduct:
Urban planning – in this case, to study the eternal Culver City headaches of traffic and parking.
“It is very complicated,” said the freshman Councilman. “If it had been easy, we would not need to study it.”
Traffic and parking are considerably worsened by Culver City’s location.
“A lot of our problem has to do with pass-through traffic,” said Mr. Eriksson.
Before cars became ubiquitous in the late 1920s and ‘30s, Founding Father Harry Culver smilingly would observe that his community inevitably was on the route to destinations on all point of the compass.
That was a huge benefit, the entrepreneur reasoned, because this geographical quirk greatly amplified exposure of Culver City to all manner of travelers.
Is it possible to lighten the burden on frustrated hometown drivers? Or a fait accompli?
“I don’t know the answer,” Mr. Eriksson said. We are going to start looking at the problem and try to figure it out. Maybe there are regional solutions.”
He will examine the Best Practices policies of other communities. Instead of consuming time designing an experimental strategy, Mr. Eriksson will probe the policies of communities with proven solutions.
(To be continued)
