From The NY Times this morning:
A tour bus on Hollywood Boulevard in 2015. The Los Angeles City Council is considering regulations to limit the access tour vans have in the Hollywood Hills, a neighborhood with narrow, twisting streets. Credit Chad Ress for The New York Times
Good morning.
Today’s introduction comes from Adam Nagourney, the Los Angeles bureau chief.
It’s not so easy living up in the Hollywood Hills these days. First it was the onslaught of tourists on foot, clogging the narrow, twisting streets as they used GPS devices in search of the Hollywood sign. These days, it’s a louder and more cumbersome intruder: open-air tour vans, pushing through on roads that can barely fit one car, some with loudspeakers blaring dubious claims by the driver. (“And on the left, the house where Humphrey Bogart once lived!”)
Confronted with the anguished concerns of neighbors, the Los Angeles City Council is trying to walk a fine line by responding to upset constituents without hurting tourism, a major economic force here. (And there are few tourist draws as big as the Hollywood sign.) The council is moving to adopt regulations that would require tour operators to give patrons private headphones, getting rid of squawky speakers. And the city is drawing up a list of streets where tour vans would be banned completely.
“You’re talking about over 100 buses every day traveling the small streets of Hollywood Hills,” said Anastasia Mann, the president of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council. “Blocking Mulholland Drive and creating huge hazards. It really gets out of hand.”
For the rest of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/us/california-today-for-hollywood-hills-tour-vans-are-nuisance.html
as with los angeles, and the rest of the world, so it is with us…..more and more people everywhere….as the world changes we in big sur must adjust too….”less is more” was never more true….
will be watching this closely to see how it all shakes out.
Multi-lingual headphones on tour buses and in museums have been standard in Europe for decades. See also this relevant article from Handelsblatt, a German business paper: https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies-markets/tourists-go-away-847236
The bigger concern is the psychological state that creates these conditions, what are we programming into the dna of the human genome and what future issues will we have to contend with, also hollywood hasn’t made a good movie in a really long time, what’s the draw? some sign blocking the view of nature? Besides if they actually followed the actors and listen, people would know they are warning against the toxic environment of hollywood and some are even trying to purge the sickness, serious issues these days, must be the quickening.