Burbank officials respond to Fourth of July parking and traffic issues around Starlight Bowl

Going out to the Starlight Bowl on the Fourth of July was an outing Burbank resident Michael James and his family looked forward to every year.

Making their way up the Verdugo Hills and watching fireworks explode in the night sky had been a treat for James and his family for two decades. However, last week’s Independence Day celebration may have been the last time James visits the Starlight Bowl.

James and many others were stuck in gridlock traffic and had to wait for as long as an hour to make their way out of the venue and the foothill area.

The 64-year-old resident said that he blamed the stacked parking at the Starlight Bowl, which he believes was the main reason behind the long wait to exit.

“They put you in really close to other cars — bumper to bumper,” James said. “If there’s a person in front of you and behind you, you’re stuck until somebody else leaves.”

Judie Wilke, the city’s parks and recreation director, said stacked parking, which has been used at the location previously, was necessary for the Fourth of July event because the dirt lots across the street from the Starlight Bowl on Lockheed View Drive can only accommodate about 900 vehicles for a venue that holds up to 4,200 people.

With about 4,000 people in attendance last Tuesday, the Parks and Recreation Department, along with the Burbank Police Department, had anticipated there would be some traffic congestion in the area and drafted a traffic plan which they hoped would alleviate any issues that night.

At other events at the venue, the crowds are not that close to capacity, Wilke said.

“We made several changes in the last few years to make the event overall safer by separating the conflict between pedestrians and vehicles,” said police Sgt. Justin Meadows. “We tried to have vehicles enter in one direction, which was through Walnut Avenue, and then have all the vehicles exit onto Bel Aire Drive.”

However, that was not the case. Meadows said those who parked in the handicap sections of the parking lots were slower to exit than organizers had anticipated, which caused delays and back-ups in the lots.

“We had three lanes of traffic that were supposed to go out of the primary driveway,” Meadows said. “That backed up in the roadway like it normally does, but it created some back-up in the lot.”

James said he was frustrated that the police department chose not to let vehicles exit onto Walnut after the event, which he thinks would have let people out faster.

“Cars and pedestrians have to live with each other everywhere,” he said. “We’re drivers, and we’re going slowly. If they had 150 people going down that hill [on Walnut], then we have to coexist.”

Meadows said that he had a plan in place to open Walnut to motorists if traffic in the parking lots got out of hand. However, because there were many people walking down Walnut in the dark after the show, it took police a while before they determined that it was safe to have both vehicles and people on that street.

“It’s a steep roadway, and there are no sidewalks,” Meadows said. “We had pedestrians walking down the middle of the road, and it’s about a half mile from the gate at Walnut to Sunset Canyon Drive. I couldn’t open the gate and let cars out where there’s going to be a conflict with pedestrians, which is what we were trying to avoid from the get-go.”

Wilke said popular ride-sharing services, such as Lyft and Uber, have become more prevalent during events at the Starlight Bowl.

Meadows said that there was a slight increase in the number of people being dropped off at the venue but added that people driving themselves and parking remain the preferred way to arrive at the location.

“There’s things that we learned from last week and things that we’ll need to improve upon,” Wilke said. “It’s too bad that people got frustrated about it because generally we are able to get people off that hill pretty quickly, which is something to commend our police department and Starlight Bowl team … At the end of the day, the safety of everybody is what was most important and that’s what was top priority that night, and we’re sorry that people were inconvenienced.”

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio