HOLLYWOOD — The following letters respond to recent reporting in The Times. They have been edited for length and clarity.

Your editorial “Legalize the Taco Cart, and This Time Do It Properly” (July 7) got the arithmetic right and the sentiment slightly wrong. I have run a sit-down restaurant on Western for twelve years, and I pay for a grease trap, a health permit, workers’ comp and a rent that would make a councilmember faint. I do not resent the cart on the corner. I resent being cast as a fossil for asking a fair question. Write the vendors a permit they can actually meet — but write it with the same inspector’s eye you turn on me, and you will hear no more complaint from this quarter. — Refugio Santana, East Hollywood

I cannot understand the merchants quoted in “Marathon Route Is Set to Run Through Hollywood Again” (July 13) who treat one closed morning as a catastrophe. I have lived off the Boulevard for thirty years. For a single day each spring the street belongs to twenty thousand people moving under their own power, families cheering strangers by name off their race bibs, and not one car horn from dawn to noon. If a bakery has its best day of the year and a delivery truck has its worst, that is a bargain the neighborhood can survive once every twelve months. — Priscilla Yee, Franklin Village

It is easy for a spectator to adore the marathon; she is not the one trying to run a business behind the barricades. Your July 13 story quoted a restaurant owner who loses lunch, dinner prep and a day’s rent to a race that sends him a crowd wanting only a muffin and a bathroom. Multiply that man by every side street inside the closure. The organizers’ new “hotline” is a phone number, not a delivery window. Shift the course one block north, as the merchants have asked for years, and half of these grievances disappear. — Dale Whitmore, Hollywood

Your editorial urging a yes vote on the library bond (“Vote for the Library Bond,” July 13) will get mine. I spent the nineteen months the Hollywood reading room was closed watching students do their homework on the front steps because the Wi-Fi still reached the sidewalk. A branch is not a comfort you fund only when money is easy. It is the one warm, free and quiet room a great many blocks have left. If the bond is the price of keeping that room standing through the next earthquake, I will pay my share and count it cheap — and the county should not treat the vote as an excuse to keep starving the hours. — Frances Lieberman, Beachwood Canyon

I live in the apartments across from the new skate park under the freeway (“Skate Park Opens Under the 101 After Eleven Years of Promises,” June 7), and I want to correct the impression that we neighbors are against it. We are not. We waited the eleven years too. What we asked at the fence was a small thing: switch the lights off at closing instead of leaving them to buzz over our bedrooms all night, and the noise of the wheels we will happily learn to sleep through. Grant us that, and the park will have no better neighbors than the people it kept awake. — Concepción Ruano, East Hollywood