The blame for our traffic woes can be given to city councils that gave in to NIMBYs

Your letters to the editor section has recently been full of accusations about who's responsible for the mess that Lynn Road has become. Everyone from the Thousand Oaks traffic engineers to the Thousand Oaks City Council and even state Sen. Tom McClintock are being blamed. Lynn Road is really bad, and the 23 Freeway is worse. We may get some relief when they finish adding a lane to the 23 Freeway, but if Caltrans works at its usual pace, by the time they get the lane added we'll have a threelane traffic jam instead of a twolane traffic jam in the morning and the evening.

There are actually five reasons why we have the current traffic mess. They were the five Thousand Oaks City Council members who welshed on an agreement that had been in place for decades. That agreement was in the Ventura County traffic plan, and the plan was to have three arterial roads between the two valleys with a total of six or seven lanes each way.

The first was the Moorpark RoadLynn RoadOlsen RoadMadera Road connection completed back in the 1960s. The second was Highway 23, completed in the '70s. The third was to be the connection of Westlake Boulevard to First Street in Simi Valley (an expressway with almost no residences fronting on it.) Altogether there would have been six lanes each way with several side connections to other streets. When it came time to connect Westlake Boulevard to First Street, the Thousand Oaks City Council, cowed by a handful of shouting NIMBYs along Westlake Boulevard, voted to refuse to connect the two streets. The result was a 33 percent cut in the number of lanes that had been planned.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist or traffic engineer to understand that when you cut the lanes available from six to four, the remaining four will be overcrowded. That's where we are today. You can go south on First Street to Wood Ranch Parkway and detour over to Olsen Road or you can go north on Westlake Boulevard and take Avenida de Los Arboles to the 23 or Olsen Road. County traffic planning depends on the cities and their elected officials keeping their promises.

I doubt that our current Thousand Oaks City Council will have the will to try to correct the problem their predecessors created.

I'm afraid we can look forward to the traffic on Lynn Road and the 23 Freeway remaining about the same. Bob Larkin Westlake Village