Editor,
There are too many people visiting Laguna Beach every day. The beaches are for everyone, but with all the new in-fill building going on inland, thousands of units at the Village at the Spectrum and elsewhere, (Crown Valley and the freeway), it’s just not fair to residents (since 1963) to deal with daily.
Those people are entitled to visit, but something must be done other than blocking off streets so they can sit there instead of the large public Main Beach Park, across the street. It is just not right for us locals. We need our secret thoroughfares to get around. We live and work here.
Going up to Legion creates a massive backlog and traffic jam. There are too many day-trippers and too few ways to drive about. Another issue is the Three Arch Bay traffic light. On Thanksgiving Day about 5 p.m., it was stop and go traffic from the Surf & Sand to the TAB light. It appears people leaving TAB trigger the light quickly. Sometimes only a few southbound cars can get through at a time. It was the worst I have ever seen.
May I suggest an unpopular solution. Be like London, England. Charge a fee for entering Laguna Beach with automatic license plate readers. In this new tech world we live in, there could be an app that residents can access and allow legitimate guests in for free, but the daily day-trippers would have to pay an entrance fee. Laguna has turned into Disneyland for free.
Well, our freedoms are impaired drastically by these people that clog up our town. Maybe a fee would keep them in the neighborhoods where they live, not our neighborhood. I know this is unpopular, but something must be done and the trolley’s mess up traffic, too, but I’ll let that go for now. Open up Park Place.
Mark L. Miller, Laguna Beach
What if Dana Point and Newport follow? Are you ok paying a fee driving on PCH? By the way “Life is not Fair” even my 6 year old knows that.
The readers are already in place. All they would have to do is some software changes.
Mark if they don’t like that, only allow locals to park downtown. Everyone else who does not have a local tag has to park out of town and take a trolley… or be towed.