Carnage Decried : Residents Demand Safer Kanan Road

Angered by the deaths of four people in a head-on collision, a group of Agoura residents Wednesday night vowed to pressure authorities for a safety crackdown on mountainous Kanan Road.

Homeowners living in canyons south of the City of Agoura Hills said they will call for increased police enforcement and improvements to the two-lane roadway that is a popular summer route to the beach.

The residents, who met at a Lobo Canyon home to plan their traffic safety campaign, warned that, if their pleas go unheeded, they might try a few tricks to induce motorists to drive more carefully. They said they might erect white crosses to mark deaths on the road, put up large billboard warnings or fashion phony wooden police cars next to the road to slow speeders.

‘Death Road’

“It’s a death road, no doubt about it,” said Peter Petrovsky, president of a local homeowners’ group called the Triumfo-Lobo Community Assn.

Petrovsky said he and his neighbors were sickened by the June 26 accident that killed three San Fernando Valley teen-agers and the driver of the speeding sports car that crashed into them.

About 40 canyon residents who attended the meeting agreed to ask the California Highway Patrol for tougher enforcement along Kanan Road, and to ask Los Angeles County traffic engineers to lower the speed limit and add double-yellow, no-passing lines and better guardrails.

If that fails, the residents said, they will do whatever necessary to draw attention to the dangers of the heavily traveled mountain route.

They said that, besides the billboards and crosses, they might erect stenciled skull-and-crossbone signs or “bodies” painted bright orange at the sites of fatal accidents. The idea of fake police cars was proposed by a homeowner who said a similar ruse worked several years ago in Northern California.

Canyon resident Karen De Pew said such reminders might help both local residents and people using the road to get to the beaches. “People slow down for six weeks after someone gets killed out here, then they speed up again,” she said.

The options prompted considerable debate among residents. Many were opposed to billboards in the scenic area. But many others nodded when Petrovsky said, “We have to stick the officials’ noses to this until they do something about it.”

Up to 8,500 vehicles a day use Kanan Road to go to or return from the beaches in the summer, according to Los Angeles County Road Department traffic counts taken in Malibu, near the south end of the winding, 13-mile route. That number is 40% higher than in the winter.

Traffic engineers said Kanan Road is much busier in Agoura Hills, where weekday traffic counts of 14,000 vehicles a day were recorded last year at a location several blocks south of the Ventura Freeway.

The frustration voiced at the homeowners’ meeting is shared by police and traffic officials. Authorities acknowledged earlier this week that speeding by beach-goers is usually to blame for fatal mishaps along the two-lane road.

“We have accidents and near-misses week after week on Kanan Road,” Calabasas Municipal Court Commissioner Richard Brand said. “People are driving out here like it was Victory Boulevard and it’s not.”

Ocean Won’t ‘Dry Up’

“The ocean isn’t going to dry up in another 20 minutes. But they all think it is,” said California Highway Patrol Capt. Richard Kerri, whose Woodland Hills-based officers cover the northern part of Kanan Road.

“Some of the mountain roads don’t have a good alignment to them and that holds speed down on them. But Kanan is smooth and has good pavement.”

Kerri said his officers have been instructed to give Kanan Road “a little extra coverage,” although he said his 73-officer patrol staff is down by six officers and “that hurts us on Kanan.”

The southern half of Kanan Road is patrolled by Malibu-based CHP officers. The 20-officer station has been organized with “overlap” shifts that allow deployment of extra patrolmen at peak periods for beach travel, Malibu CHP Sgt. Terry Enright said.

“There is an awful lot of speeding from young people from the San Fernando and Conejo valleys. They are all in a hurry to get to the beach,” Enright said. “Every inch of the roads in the mountains is dangerous. There isn’t a single spot where a driver can divert his attention.”

Well-Maintained

County road officials said Kanan Road is heavily maintained because of lawsuits filed following accidents that occurred after the roadway was completed through the Santa Monica Mountains about 10 years ago.

“Accidents on Kanan tend to be spectacular, catastrophic,” county Road Commissioner Thomas Tidemanson said. “I wish I had some way to reach down with a big sky hook and jerk that guy off the road before he killed those three kids,” he said, referring to the driver who caused the recent fatal accident.

Tidemanson said features such as speed bumps, suggested by some Agoura mountain residents for Kanan Road, are not feasible. But other methods of persuading motorists to slow down might work, he said.

“We’d consider something like crosses at the side of the road,” he said. “We’d see what we can do to impress upon people the speeding problem.”

Tidemanson said, however, that the novelty of crosses marking the locations of fatal crashes would soon wear off and that permanent maintenance of the signs would be a problem.