Residents, city officials look to restart efforts to ease traffic safety issues near Palm Crest Elementary
After trying temporary safety measures and negotiating with neighbors about how to make the juncture of Earlmont and Fairmount avenues safer for Palm Crest Elementary School walkers, city officials have decided to meet residents back at the drawing board.
In a Nov. 16 meeting, members of La Cañada’s Public Works and Traffic Commission asked citizens to choose from a menu of traffic calming measures on and around Fairmount that might help make the walk to and from school safer. Options included crosswalks, additional stop signs and a variety of medians and hardscaped areas to block traffic and offer pedestrian refuge.
But, with commissioners and residents ultimately unable to reach consensus on any one city-generated option, the panel decided to sit down with school officials and affected neighbors and see if collaboration might work where bureaucracy has so far failed.
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“We should follow up more with residents to figure out a comprehensive solution on this,” Commissioner Daniel Drugan said. “Because right now, it feels to me it’s like a dartboard — here’s a good option, here’s (another) good option. I’d like staff to do a little more investigative work on this with the residents and come back with a final recommendation.”
Talk about improving the area came up in April 2015, when a local Brownie troop approached the city’s traffic engineer with a petition requesting something be done to calm traffic by creating an all-way stop at Fairmount and Earlmont avenues, according to city documents.
Neighbors who disagreed with installing an all-way stop filed their own petition in June, and commissioners sat down to find a solution both parties might agree to. The repositioning of a stop sign at Earlmont and some lane striping prohibiting parking nearby were tried as a pilot study on a temporary basis.
When commissioners moved this May to make the changes permanent, residents appealed the decision and the issue was brought before the City Council in June. Council members couldn’t decide on a single solution, so remanded the matter back to the Public Works and Traffic Commission.
Last Wednesday’s meeting was the second public hearing held at the commission level. Parties on both sides confirmed, or dispelled, the need for improvements. Fairmount resident Bill Shupper, who regularly walks his grandchildren to Palm Crest and supports some kind of change, urged the commission to reconsider going back to Square One.
“I really don’t like the ‘scrap it and start over’ [option] because we’ve already done that,” he said.
But commissioners expressed hope that starting again, this time with input from a wider variety of neighborhood stakeholders and school officials, might net a more agreeable result. Commissioner Eldon Horst said he’d like to hear more input from Palm Crest staff and parents who use Fairmount as a pick-up and drop-off point.
“Without hearing from folks, I don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. I don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve,” Horst said.
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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com
Twitter: @SaraCardine
