NIMBY-ism masquerading as altruism. Must be all those exhaust fumes clouding your thinking.

The reality of the situation is that children are put at risk daily by people roaring down Hollywood and Ridge at 60 miles per hour. The reality is your sucking down liters of polluted air from the thousands of cars idling every day at LSD and Sheridan. That’s the reality.

The lakefront is a vital resource that should be available and open to the entire city. Not the few thousand people who voted on this silly referendum, which is barely even 5% of the population of Edgewater and Rogers Park.

The people haven’t spoken on this. The NIMBYs who are fired up about losing their private beaches are the only ones who have spoken.

The outer drive extension would destroy beaches that many people have paid a premium to enjoy.

Worse, the outer drive extension means more money allocated to expanding limited- access roads at a time when use is bound to contract steeply over the next few years. In five to ten years, car ownership will probably be two thirds what it is now at the most. We need badly to expand our overtaxed and inadequate city transit, for ridership will most likely at least double as gasoline crosses the $5 per gallon frontier forever.

Most Rogers Park and Edgewater homeowners like the lakefront as it is and would rather the money be allocated to repairing and improving our existing parks.

As an Edgewater resident, I’m scandalized by those in opposition to extending the park and extending Lake Shore Drive.

We have a de facto extension of Lake Shore Drive cutting violently through our neighborhood right now, putting pedestrians at risk on a daily basis and increasing our air pollution: it’s called Hollywood and Ridge.

The “overwhelming majority” of residents in opposition to any of these plans is, in reality, just a few hundred folks, the overwhelming majority of which are Sheridan high rise residents who are simply trying to protect their private beaches.

I say shame on all of you who act as though opposing plans to create more parkland and more beaches is some sort of noble conservation effort. It’s a transparent ploy.

Extend the park. Extend Lake Shore Drive. And turn Hollywood and Ridge back into neighborhood streets, not the dangerous high speed expressway they have become.