Our Response to the Daily Bruin Article

Anthony… I’m assuming you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes, but it has not escaped our notice that your distraught handicapped person, Victor Pineda, is a Graduate Student in Urban Planning, surprise, surprise, the same department that spawned the whole attack on Apron Parking in the North Village courtesy of Michael Dukakis and, you guessed it, Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup. To not mention Mr. Pineda’s connection to Shoup in the story damages its credibility.  What was quite possibly an oversight can appear, through skeptical eyes, to be a set-up by the Daily Bruin.

 

The ADA has never been the real issue here. It is the fact that Kitty Dukakis doesn’t like the way we’re parked and Professors Dukakis and Shoup have been misusing the resources of a taxpayer-funded university to inflict their will on us and damage our property values.  

 

Their central argument about blocked sidewalks is a straw man. Everybody agrees that a wheelchair should be able to pass down the sidewalks and that cars blocking the sidewalk should be ticketed or towed.  That has never been in question. In fact, cars are ticketed for blocking the sidewalk. 

 

As to the rest of the ADA claim, it seems that there has been a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue by Shoup and Dukakis given that San Francisco has recently legalized apron parking, therefore they obviously do not believe Apron parking to be an ADA violation.

 

We agree that it would be nice if the city would fix the sidewalks and provide ramps at the curbs.  We also believe there are a lot of livability issues in Westwood that should be addressed, such as rampant crime. We also believe it would be nice if they fixed the new crime magnet: a graffiti strewn ex-fraternity ruin at the corner of Landfair and Strathmore.

 

We do not believe that some dubious ADA claim by Shoup (who certainly knows about San Francisco) is anything other than a tool to get their way. 

 

We also do not see how it can possibly be in UCLA’s interests to arouse the already inflamed neighborhoods surrounding UCLA (take a look at the recall Weiss signs on the lawns – the underlying issue there is in no small part congestion) by having runaway professors making unnecessary enemies.  We have already asked that Michael Dukakis not be invited back to UCLA on our blogsite and are prepared to follow it up with petitions if necessary.