EDITORIAL STREET SMARTS IF THIS IS ALL L.A. MAYOR CAN DO TO RELIEVE TRAFFIC, WE'RE IN BIG TROUBLE.UPON announcing Street Smart, his latest effort to improve traffic flow on city streets, Mayor James Hahn For the Iowa politician, see . James Kenneth "Jim" Hahn (born July 3, 1950) is an American politician from the Democratic Party. He was the Deputy City Attorney (1975-1979), City Controller (1981-1985), City Attorney (1985-2001) and Mayor of Los Angeles, California said something incredibly troubling. ``We are doing everything we can to improve the city's busiest streets,'' he said as he promoted the dedication of $200,000 for simple traffic solutions. That's right, $200,000 - part of a three-year, $1.8 million anti-congestion plan. Fifty cents a person to fix gridlock Gridlock A government, business or institution's inability to function at a normal level due either to complex or conflicting procedures within the administrative framework or to impending change in the business. ? The plan includes recalibrating signals on key arterial boulevards, as well as assigning traffic officers to troubled areas to aggressively ticket motorists who park in no-park lanes during rush hour. If this is everything Hahn's administration can do to improve the ever- worsening congestion The condition of a network when there is not enough bandwidth to support the current traffic load. congestion - When the offered load of a data communication path exceeds the capacity. , then the city's in even worse trouble than we thought. Give the mayor credit: This was one case in which he honored the ``fair share'' demand by doling out about one-third of the cheap traffic fixes to the San Fernando Valley San Fernando Valley Valley, southern California, U.S. Northwest of central Los Angeles, the valley is bounded by the San Gabriel, Santa Susana, and Santa Monica mountains and the Simi Hills. , which has many of the city's worst intersections. But he didn't come close to addressing the larger injustice caused by robbing the Valley and other areas of the city to fund a corrupt pay-to-play political system and build monuments to downtown egotists. The city paid public relations public relations, activities and policies used to create public interest in a person, idea, product, institution, or business establishment. By its nature, public relations is devoted to serving particular interests by presenting them to the public in the most firm Fleishman-Hillard - which is now under investigation for allegations of overbilling the city - to promote its monopoly utility five times as much over the past three years as it spent on Hahn's three-year traffic improvement plan. Apparently making real improvements is worth significantly less than making the public think it's getting improvements. Besides, this isn't really Hahn's plan at all. Much of the money to pay for these traffic improvement measures was approved by former Gov. Gray Davis before Hahn was ever mayor, at the urging of then-Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a Hahn rival in the mayoral campaign. This Street Smart program is the least of what what city officials ought to be doing in the course of their duties, and certainly should not be heralded as some great progressive program by Hahn. The next time the mayor decides to hold a news conference touting touting the making of personal representations by a veterinarian to persons who are not clients in an attempt to solicit their business. a program, he should take pains Verb 1. take pains - try very hard to do something be at pains endeavor, endeavour, strive - attempt by employing effort; "we endeavor to make our customers happy" to make sure he actually deserves credit. |
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