A 'diet' to give California drivers indigestion

A 'diet' to give California drivers indigestion - The Orange County Register:
"...The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.”
This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. 
This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work.
This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.
The OPR move reflects the increasingly self-righteous extremism animating the former Jesuit’s underlings.
Ironically, the governor’s proposals to impose this road diet rest partly on expanding the California Environmental Quality Act, which Brown, in a more insightful moment, described as a “vampire” that needs a “stake through the heart.”
Now, instead, the inquisitors seize on vague legislative language and push it to what the Southern California Leadership Council has dubbed “an undesirable and unmanageable extreme.”
In essence, the notion animating the “road diet” is to make congestion so terrible that people will be forced out of their cars and onto transit. 
It’s not planning for how to make the ways people live today more sustainable.
It has, in fact, more in common with Soviet-style social engineering, which was based similarly on a particular notion of “science” and progressive values..."