Letter to the Editor:
At the Burbank City Council’s 9/9/2025 meeting, public speaker Mary O’Hare–GOTO: The Burbank Channel on YouTube [41:20 to 43:56]–denouncing SB 79. We must 86 SB 79 because it amounts to State-sponsored developmental terrorism aimed, in part, to subdue Burbankers. (Mary O’Hare’s 9/3/2025 Opinion letter to the BURBANK LEADER on our city’s probable ruination by SB 79’s impostion is worth reading online.)
As a geographer, I have noticed the impressive dedication of Los Angeles’ METRO speakers, in cahoots with Burbank’s planner-politicians, to presenting mostly maps of the BRT route which emphasize a bird’s-eye viewpoint. Such sometimes persuasive cartography is intended by its users to stress a top-down perspective. Why? The showing of a topographic horizon that is unconstrained, always expanding, is meant to foster the concept of continuous planning. It is propaganda.
In other words, the burgeoning BRT EV bus path will not forever remain to the mapped route shown passing through the City of Burbank. Transportation SYSTEMS are always line-based transportation growth imposed by persons other than those called taxpayers. Adventitious add-ons will come eventually. Accepting METRO’s idea of future Burbank is infrastructure developmental suicide!
Burbank’s planner-politicians have not presented to the public illustrations of so-called BRT Stations at Buena Vista/Olive or Verdugo/Olive Avenue, only an ugly, colorfully cluttered street-view of a station situated at San Fernando/Olive in downtown Burbank near our beautiful City Hall and its classic fronting recently refurbished fountain! I think ground-based, pedestrian level, BRT illustrations might deeply offend the sensibilities of caring Burbankers and, thus, planner-politicians (fearful of city taxpayer rejection) know such pictures will put the kibosh on their frothy sales-pitch!
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
