Opinion: Let Us Drive the Ballona Freeway!

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If you’ve ever driven on the Marina Freeway, you’ve found that -- like a really great vacation -- it feels like it’s over before it began.

‘The 90,’’ the Marina Freeway, can’t be more than a couple of miles long, a stub that leads you off the San Diego Freeway and dumps you near, as the name promises, Marina del Rey.

The 90 is no stranger to name changes. It was known for about 15 minutes as the Richard M. Nixon Freeway, a name that, for obvious reasons, was quietly removed.

So it’s time to change it again -- for good, and for good reason.

I thought about this as I was driving the Marina Freeway after Tuesday’s ‘’Celebrate Ballona’’ awards dinner. It honored some public officials as well as several of my journalistic colleagues and me for what we had done and written and said about the remarkable Ballona wetlands, the 600 or so acres of surviving coastal wetlands which are owned by the state and, Deo volente, eternally protected from development.

‘’The Marina Freeway’’ isn’t much of an improvement on ‘’the Richard M. Nixon Freeway.’’ Instead of giving the freeway the name of a manmade feature -- the marina of Marina del Rey -- let’s name it instead after something that’s a reminder of California’s vanishing natural beauty: that rare and radiant fragment of landscape that shows us what coastal Southern California once was like.

Let’s call it the Ballona Freeway.

Commuters and tourists alike who will never see the wetlands will at least see the freeway signs, and ask some questions, and find out what they mean. And who knows? Some people might get curious enough about the name to decide to check the place out.

Who’s with me on this? Mayor Villaraigosa? Councilman Rosendahl? Speaker Bass? I may just keep after all of you until this one happens. Will someone start making up those ‘’Greenlight the Ballona Freeway!’’ buttons? With the presidential election over and done with, there’s plenty of available space on people’s lapels for some new causes.