Darts & Letters

Restaurant Reviews
That Really Rule

I never do this, but since it’s a Sunday and I’m in a good mood, here goes. I just finished perusing this month’s San Diego Metropolitan and want to tell you how much both I and my wife enjoy the restaurant features written in your magazine by Terryl Gavre.

Whenever it is getting to be the fifth or sixth of the month, my wife starts in on me to bring it home so that she can read Gavre’s dining story and the “Dishing It Out” column. She really has a great love for what she is writing about, and her enthusiasm is only outdone by her sense of humor.

We have gone to most of the restaurants that she writes about and often use her selections as a guide when ordering. We have impressed our friends many times by being so “up on the dining scene.”

Thank you for providing a bit of informative entertainment along with the hard-hitting business articles the Metropolitan is known for.

Jeffrey L. O’Conner
San Diego

His ‘Insensitivity’
Rankles Readers

Alan Nevin’s insensitive arrogance in his February article “Real Property” on UTC should garner an onion award. He owes local residents an apology. He wrote: “When I attend public hearings nowadays, I always find a few people with a well-defined mental illness. They are incapable of accepting change in any form. Anything that is different from the life they led in high school is seen as anathema. It’s a spreading sickness. Maybe we can start a fund to provide research on this terrible illness that constricts the supply of housing, destroys creativity and inevitably leads to a community’s obsolescence.”

Where does Nevin hang his hat at night? Does he live in University City? Does he start and stop on Genesee so choked with traffic? Has he seen the fallout from overbuilding? Are dancing dollar signs his motivation as director of research with a realty company so that he can cash in on the building boom?

The life this resident lived in high school encouraged creativity, embraced nature like our canyons, and questioned the goals of business people who would slam down a 40-story building and then leave town laughing all the way to the bank.

Sandra Lippe
South University City

What a disappointment to read Alan Nevin’s insults to the community in your usually fine publications. University City is second only to Downtown in density; the promised infrastructure is lagging far behind despite the collection of FBA funds to provide it, and funding for much needed transit is undefined.

The daily gridlock we experience is about to become worse as hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office and residential projects are completed, yet Nevin feels we suffer from a “well-defined mental illness” because we protest additional density without the correction of the existing problems.

I won’t suggest what fund might be started for him; however, I would challenge Nevin to put his talents to use by conducting a complete survey, not a statistical sample, of all the businesses in the University Community Plan area to determine the following:

• How many of their employees live in the community plan area?
  
  
• Of those who do, how many walk to work? If not, why?
  
  
• How many members of their household work outside the community plan area?

Urban planners and residents alike would then have a more accurate assessment of the assertion that density results in workable communities where students live and work.

Carole Pietras

What About The
Old-Fashioned Bike?

I read with some interest the portion of Gary H. London’s “Real Property” column (March 2003) where he mentions his favorite new transportation technology is the Segway Human Transporter. London believes this device is ideal for “travel locally over relatively short distances with speed and efficiency,” and the Segway could have “major implications for our urban development.”

I hope London isn’t ignoring the bicycle, which has been used by commuters to travel locally over relatively short distances with speed and efficiency for about 100 years and counting. Bicycles use established, time-proven technology, and they have an installed support base of retailers and repair people. By contrast, the Segway is still very much an experimental device available from only one vendor.

Further, many of the challenges to the way we move about posed by the Segway — such as where to ride them, how to park and secure them and by what means we can bring them onto public transportation to increase travel range — have already been addressed, although sometimes in an inadequate fashion, for bicycles.

The brakes, gearing, shifting, suspension and frame materials of bicycles, that cost from one-fifteenth to one-fifth the price of a Segway, have undergone evolutionary and even revolutionary improvements in the past two decades. London may want to take a trip to his local bike shop to see what they have to offer residents of “our urban core,” to use his phrase.

Always wear your helmet and ride safely.

Robert Leone
San Diego