Tear out the Santa Monica Freeway? Are City Council members insane?

Common sense just might be dead at Santa Monica City Hall.

How else to explain a proposal to rip out a large swath of Interstate 10?

The City Council in June voted 7-0 to accept a $2 million federal grant to study “cap parks” over the Santa Monica Freeway between 11th and 20th streets. 

But council members didn’t stop there. They also told staff (with straight faces) to study obliterating that segment of the freeway.

Evidently, council members think Santa Monica would benefit from destroying the main transportation route in and out of the city.

The term for this is sheer lunacy. 

City officials claim the stretch of freeway, which opened in the 1960s, displaced more than 1,500 residents in what is now a mostly black and Latino community. 

Apparently they would atone for that now, 60 years later, by crippling everyone’s capacity to connect with the rest of Los Angeles.

To dump even a fraction of Santa Monica’s I-10 traffic onto city surface streets would create soul-crushing gridlock on arteries such as Pico, Olympic and Santa Monica boulevards. 

That’s what the council wants? For real?

Just this week, City Manager Oliver Chi bemoaned declining tourism in Santa Monica, blaming that convenient villain Donald Trump.

But the president aside, what exactly do Chi and the council expect to happen to tourism if they cut freeway access to the beach? 

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It certainly won’t go up.

If only this farce were a story from the Babylon Bee, or the Onion, or another satire publication.

Building a park over the freeway, given the city’s myriad other needs, is silly enough. But ripping up the freeway? That’s just bonkers.

The council will virtue-signal, some community zealots might claim a win, and perhaps a few residents would prefer a freeway-less utopia to the practical needs of daily living near the coast.

But c’mon.

Like it or not, getting around LA requires freeway driving. This region –– unlike dense metro areas such as New York or San Francisco –– does not lend itself to mass public transit in lieu of car travel. 

Of course, the Santa Monica Freeway can’t be eviscerated without approval from the state and federal governments.

But the grant for this study comes courtesy of the US Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which funds efforts to “repair” neighborhoods divided by major transportation infrastructure.

And the California Legislature created a similar program in 2023.

Ugh. How about –– instead of nursing grievances and squandering taxpayer dollars on political vanity projects –– we retain modern conveniences and protect quality of life for current and future residents?

Again: When there’s serious discussion of ripping out essential transportation corridors, common sense has left the building.

That’s why Santa Monica voters should look carefully at the candidates for three council seats on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Who has a forward-looking vision for the city? And who favors turning the transportation clock back to the 1960s?