Public Eye

Warned by new Pasadena City Hall reporter Fred Ortega that old Pasadena City Hall reporter Todd Ruiz, now put out to pasture and living in a Goth-styled Hobbit hutch somewhere northeast of the Shire, had resumed blogging and had posted about just what I had already written about this morning, I just had to get it out there:

Just as there should be a law saying that for every new law passed, one should be eliminated, so should there be an edict demanding that for every new city sign erected in the over-signed Arroyo Seco, an old one is removed.

Walkers, runners, bicyclists, equestrians and motorists in the Big Ditch are already told what to do six ways from Sunday by Mama City and her signs.

New ones pop up all the time, and no one ever takes one down.

“You are in a golf course environment,” one series of signs read. Uh-huh — I think I noticed that, seeing as how there are 36 vast fairways filled with hackers at Brookside and the fence around them is merely chain link. This signage appeared around the time of the godawful towering netted ball catchers that ruin views for everyone and stop a few sliced Titleists a day from ending up on West Drive or Rosemont Avenue. Yes, I know it’s all aimed at defusing litigation from anyone hit by a ball. Doesn’t make it right.

The latest signs, posted within the past few weeks, tut-tut at pedestrians who dare amble the “wrong way” around the famed Rose Bowl loop. There’s a silhouette of a walker and an indication that if you can read the sign because you happen to be heading clockwise around the 3.1 miles, you’re a very, very bad boy indeed.

A loop-use meeting was scheduled for last night in the Brookside clubhouse so that Mamacita could wrap her apron strings a little bit tighter around our wrists.

I know that City Hall believes all this is in the interest of our safety, and that it will call me irresponsible for making light of all the bureaucratic hoo-hah.

And I don’t care, because it’s not true. The real safety solution, as I’ve been saying for years, is out there, and the city won’t take it. Ban all non-emergency motor vehicles from around 90 percent of the loop. The only car access really needed is into the golf course parking lot and the soccer fields to the south. Everywhere else is a road to nowhere that should be limited to recreational use.

With cars gone, the racing bicyclists’ fantastic peloton, the decades-old pack that the city is suddenly so desperate to ban from the arroyo, would be safe as milk.

There would be tons of room for all comers, in fact.

Instead, the city goes on spinning its wheels, as it were, creating new regulations instead of dealing with the core problem, which is not those of us on foot or on horseback (or pedal). It insists that these are not new regulations, of course: merely enforcement of traditional traffic laws. But this is not a traditional city-street place. We don’t want to be threatened with tickets for choosing to run one way rather than another in the back-to-nature Arroyo Seco. Save your jaywalking lectures for Colorado Boulevard, where the metal machines indeed rule. Save your banning impulses for graffiti and litter — unless it’s the car that you’d like to ban, freeing this one tiny part of the world from its hegemony.

Oh, yeah: and come walk with us when I join Mayor Bill Bogaard on his monthly walk around the loop at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday, March 5, to celebrate the healthy initiatives of Up & Moving Pasadena. Meet us at Gate A south of the stadium. And if I head the wrong way in a fit of pique, just slap me silly.