Guest Opinion | Drive a Car? We Don’t Like Your Kind Around Here

[Editor’s Note: This Opinion piece originally pointed to a June City Council meeting date. The item has been re-agendized, and the article has therefore been appropriately updated.]

PROHIBITED – Drive-through business, all vehicle services including car or motorcycle: repair, body shops, service stations, washing, detailing, sales, leasing and vehicle storage. The old ones can stay but nothing new that deals with the automobile. It’s progress, the city must look toward the future. Cars are so yesterday.

Called the Pasadena Transit-Oriented Development Ordinance, it’s a noble plan to get us out of our cars and take public transportation. Already in existence TOD Zones encompass each of Pasadena’s five train stations. These new TOD updates call for doubling the size of each from 1/2 mile to a full mile and adding a multitude of new prohibited uses. Allowing the building of large apartment structures and limited parking is legal and policy. The thinking here is these hundreds of new apartment dwellers will use public transportation and not need that dirty old car.

I get it but could Planning please explain how making it more difficult to get your car repaired helps to achieve the goal of less cars? It could be argued that a super market or retail business generates much more traffic than a repair facility. Should they and others be added to the “Propitiated list”?

So this is the first you have heard about TOD Zones? Well there is a reason for that. Only Pasadena City web sites and official locations posted the notices when staff, the Transportation Advisory and Planning Commissions met. Unless previously signed up no emails were sent out. No notices were put up in the neighborhood or mailed to those that live within these new TOD Zones.

One size fits all is one more challenge for these TOD zones. Pasadena is a large city so downtown or the Huntington Hospital district could easily have different density and business wants then the more rural Allen and Sierra Madre Villa area.

The Pasadena City Council is scheduled to take up this matter on July 11th. Email them your thoughts or attend the Monday Night 6:30 p.m. Council meeting at City Hall. Your input helps shape policy.

 

Howie Zechner said he is a long standing resident and business owner in the city of Pasadena who plans to attend the July 11 City Council meeting.