Council Orders Prescription to Decongest the 101

Dissatisfied with efforts to reduce gridlock on the Ventura Freeway through the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles City Council on Friday ordered a comprehensive plan to unclog the vital corridor.

“We have got to find a way to address this crisis,” said City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who told colleagues that she often drives for an hour and a half from her Tarzana home to reach downtown Los Angeles.

“If traffic cannot move smoothly and efficiently, the cost to our economy and quality of life is staggering,” Chick said.

By 2020, the Valley’s population is expected to be 39% higher than it was in 1990, but there are no major freeway projects in the works to handle the additional demand and little, if any, room to expand the Ventura Freeway, the Valley’s main artery. More than 550,000 motorists pass through the interchange of the Ventura and San Diego freeways each day, an increase of about 13% during the past decade. The junction, built in 1956, has become the fourth-busiest in the state and receives most of the blame for congestion along the Ventura Freeway.

In November, the Ventura-San Diego freeway interchange was ranked as the seventh-worst bottleneck in the nation, based on a study by the American Highway Users Alliance.

“We’ve got to deal with this particular interchange,” said Doug Failing, a California Transportation Department division chief. “That is where the bulk of our focus is right now.”

But the council action Friday seeks a long-term plan for easing congestion along the entire stretch of the Ventura Freeway from Agoura Hills to the Hollywood Freeway.

While average freeway speeds during rush hour in Southern California are about 35 mph, the average westbound speed on the Ventura at Hayvenhurst Avenue at 5:30 p.m. is 30 mph, and it is below 25 mph at the Hollywood Freeway. Both speeds are considered by transportation officials to be below acceptable standards.

The average westbound speed on the Ventura Freeway through the San Diego interchange at 5:30 p.m. is 15 mph, which Caltrans considers indicative of severe congestion.

“It’s basically stop and go,” said Tom Choe, a Caltrans planner.

In Encino, about 330,000 motorists travel both ways on the Ventura Freeway on an average day, with rush hour traffic routinely exceeding the freeway’s capacity of 2,200 vehicles per hour per lane, Choe said.

Caltrans has about $18 million worth of small projects in the design stage to provide short-term relief. Construction is scheduled to begin next year on an additional lane on the northbound San Diego Freeway from Mulholland Drive to Greenleaf Street. About five months later, construction should begin on widening the northbound connector of the San Diego to the Ventura.

But other improvements aren’t progressing. For instance, more than a year after city officials proposed a trial closure of the Haskell Avenue exit from the Ventura Freeway to reduce congestion, Caltrans is still awaiting a city study of how that might affect surrounding neighborhoods, Failing said.

The U.S. Transportation Department announced in October 1998 that it would provide $500,000 for a comprehensive study to fix the gridlocked interchange. But it was a year after the original announcement before a consultant was hired to do the study.

And the scope of the study has been scaled back significantly. Originally proposed to develop a plan for an $800-million replacement of the interchange, the funding was insufficient, so the study now will propose short-term solutions to the traffic crunch.

That means there still is no comprehensive proposal for the Ventura Freeway, officials said.

The opening of Metro Rail stations in North Hollywood and Universal City in June could reduce traffic on the Hollywood Freeway through the Cahuenga Pass, according to James Okazaki, a city transportation administrator.

“We think that will clean up the freeway in that area,” Okazaki said.

Okazaki said his office hopes next year to apply for funding to improve the De Soto and Canoga avenue offramps of the Ventura Freeway to further reduce congestion.

Chick said she hopes the study ordered Friday by the City Council will begin to identify long-term solutions and potential financial resources.

City Councilman Hal Bernson said the problem has been years in the making. He said plans have been developed in the past, only to be shelved for lack of financing or political will.

“Unfortunately we do these studies and nobody listens,” Bernson said. “Hopefully somebody will start listening, because if they don’t, we won’t be able to move.”

Bernson told his colleagues it is time to dust off proposals made in the early 1980s but never enacted, including a recommendation to build a second deck on the Ventura Freeway and recommendations to extend rail systems across the floor of the Valley.

Building a second level on the freeway as a self-financed toll road is one way to get around the problem of widening the existing 101 in a heavily developed corridor, Bernson said.

“It is still realistic,” Bernson said. “If we had done it when it was first proposed, we wouldn’t have a problem today,”

Bernson chairs a task force with the Southern California Assn. of Governments which he said will release a report in March recommending an extension of rail lines across the Valley and all the way to Ventura to reduce freeway congestion.

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Gridlock on Ventura Freeway

The City Council on Friday ordered transportation officials to draft an action plan for reducing congestion on the Ventura Freeway between Agoura Hills and the Hollywood Freeway. Current plans to ease traffic congestion on the 101 and 405 interchange include adding one lane for the north-bound 405 from Mulholland to Greenleaf Street (construc-tion may begin in spring 2001) and widening the north-bound 405 connector to the north and southbound 101.