Skepticism Greets State Plan to Widen Santa Monica Blvd.

The controversial and long-delayed effort to streamline traffic in three heavily traveled Westside communities has taken a tentative step forward with the release of a state study that claims that major improvements on Santa Monica Boulevard would cause little adverse environmental impact.

But the Department of Transportation study is being met with skepticism by Beverly Hills and West Hollywood officials, who fear that the agency’s extensive road-widening plans would harm local businesses and outweigh the benefits of easing long-term traffic congestion.

Caltrans may have slowed its own project’s momentum by agreeing to a new proposal--unveiled last week--which would transfer ownership of a median strip on Santa Monica Boulevard to West Hollywood. Under an earlier agreement, Caltrans would have been given ownership of the strip, which would have made it easier for the agency to widen the boulevard there.

Little Harm Seen

The recent flurry of activity sparked by Caltrans’ study comes after almost two quiet years, during which Caltrans engineers and researchers studied the environmental impact of the proposed Santa Monica Boulevard improvements.

The results, released in a 130-page document, indicate that there would be little significant social or environmental harm caused by road widening from four to six lanes. The Caltrans study states that the road widening “would not significantly affect neighborhoods or community cohesion” and “would not have so significant an effect on traffic and travel that communities would be changed.’

Caltrans’ final recommendations, due next summer, are expected to prove crucial to the fate of a project that has been pushed by state, Los Angeles city and county officials without success since 1959, when the state Legislature first approved plans for the Beverly Hills Freeway, a major highway that would have stretched from the Hollywood Freeway to the San Diego Freeway.

“By the end of this process, we should have a clear idea of what the state can support and whether we have a consensus between all the parties involved,” said Paul Taylor, deputy executive director of the county Transportation Commission, which oversees the funding of regional transportation projects. “There’s been a strong effort to reach that consensus.”

Over the years, however, a consensus has seemed unattainable. The Beverly Hills Freeway, the original link that would have been built along the Santa Monica Boulevard corridor, was scuttled in the late 1970s by fierce opposition from Westside homeowners’ groups and Beverly Hills city officials. It was then permanently killed by the Legislature’s decision to withhold funding.

Congestion Along Boulevard

In the past five years, Caltrans engineers and city and county officials, still convinced that traffic congestion had to be eased along Santa Monica Boulevard, have pushed for a scaled-down version of the freeway link. Caltrans engineers have drawn up a variety of traffic improvement projects along a four-mile stretch of the boulevard between La Cienega Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway.

Although Caltrans has yet to commit to a specific proposal, its engineers have repeatedly stressed the need for a permanent solution to growing traffic congestion on levard.

They point to morning rush-hour traffic jams in Century City, where cars stack up at intersections along Santa Monica Boulevard and at parking garages in ever-lengthening lines. They point to afternoon rush-hour traffic that clogs Santa Monica Boulevard from the San Diego Freeway to West Hollywood.

The worst bottleneck, they said, is Beverly Hills, where traffic lights at every intersection on the boulevard slow traffic to a crawl. There, at the height of rush hour, between 4 and 5 p.m., cars can take up to three minutes to travel a city block.

“On an average day, 40,000 cars use (the entire four-mile stretch of) Santa Monica Boulevard,” said David J. Kilmurray, a Caltrans engineer assigned to the project. “It’s only going to get worse.”

The alternatives, which range from dropping the entire project to a $254-million road-widening and tunnel project, are explored in Caltrans’ new environmental study.

The $254-million alternative, including a two-lane tunnel to be built under Beverly Hills, is regarded as the most innovative and the one least likely to succeed. Its cost alone--more than $190 million higher than any other option--appears prohibitive, but Beverly Hills officials insist that it is the only way the project could proceed in their city.

“Certainly, everyone says it’s too expensive,” said city Planning Director Irwin Kaplan. “But as the situation worsens, we are converging at a point in time when everyone is going to see a tunnel as the only meaningful solution.”

Beverly Hills officials fought proposals for the original east-west freeway link and are equally opposed to any widening of Santa Monica Boulevard within the city limits.

“Even if you widen the streets, you are still stuck with traffic lights at almost every intersection and heavy north-south traffic,” said Beverly Hills Councilman Benjamin Stansbury. “You’d also have to condemn all the stores between Little Santa Monica and Santa Monica. I can’t think of a better way to get the entire city up in arms.”

Scoffed at Tunnel

But Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the Los Angeles sections of Santa Monica Boulevard that could be affected by any road improvements and who favors some variation of the widening alternative, scoffed at talk of a tunnel.

“Sure, why don’t we all get tunnels?” he asked. “I’d like to route all of our major streets underground. But that’s obviously impossible. We’re setting up criteria that we can’t meet. Everyone always finds a reason to say no.”

Officials in neighboring West Hollywood facetiously insist that if Beverly Hills gets a tunnel, they want one too. “It’s an impossible demand,” said a West Hollywood official, who requested anonymity. “It’s Beverly Hills’ way of saying, ‘Include us out.’ As long as road-widening is a threat, we can take that attitude too.”

The alternative that has drawn the most opposition from Beverly Hills and West Hollywood is a $62-million plan to widen Santa Monica Boulevard from four to six lanes between Sepulveda Boulevard (one block east of the San Diego Freeway) on the west and La Cienega Boulevard on the east. A third widening alternative, which would also cost about $61 million, would involve road widening and, in the Century City area, would transform two adjoining sections of Santa Monica Boulevard into separate, one-way roads.

The Caltrans study suggests that all the alternatives discussed in its report would not “significantly impact or cause disruption of orderly planned development and would not be significantly inconsistent with adopted local planning.”

But in West Hollywood, officials insist that the widening of Santa Monica Boulevard would cause great disruptions, not only to businesses lining both sides of the boulevard and residents living nearby, but also to city plans to create an “urban village” in West Hollywood.

Main Street Plans

“This proposal would devastate our main street and turn us into a freeway with a few residential areas on the outside,” said West Hollywood City Councilman Alan Viterbi.

“We are trying to create a pedestrian-oriented, low-scale development pattern along Santa Monica Boulevard,” said Mark Winogrond, the city’s director of community development.

Concerned that widening plans call for the reduction or elimination of parking on the boulevard, Winogrond said that any widening “without a buffer or even a row of parked cars would change the whole nature of the boulevard. Businesses would suffer because parking would no longer be available, and neighboring residential areas would suffer because parking would be pushed into those areas.”

Any road widening project in West Hollywood would require the removal of a median strip that stretches from La Cienega Boulevard to Doheny Drive. Because the city has only two small parks, city officials have tried to beautify the strip, planting grass and trees and installing flags and banners.

But until last week, it was not certain who would gain final possession of the strip. Portions had been owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad and several private owners. But nearly two years ago, Los Angeles County--which governed West Hollywood before the city’s incorporation--used its eminent domain powers to file suit against the owners, intending to condemn the median strip, buy it from the various landowners and then turn the strip over to Caltrans.

“The idea was to make improvements on that corridor that would benefit the traffic flow,” said County Supervisor Ed Edelman, who represented the West Hollywood area until it incorporated last year.

Possession of the strip would have given Caltrans, which has to purchase any privately held property within the perimeter of its road projects, a head start for any road widening.

But after West Hollywood incorporated last year, the new city quickly made clear its intention to take over the median strip. After several months of negotiations, the city announced last week a proposal under which the county would continue its condemnation proceedings but would then transfer ownership of the median strip to West Hollywood instead of Caltrans.

Approval Needed

The agreement requires approval from both the West Hollywood City Council, which took up the matter at its most recent meeting, and the county Board of Supervisors. The agreement would also require approval from Caltrans, which according to project engineer Kilmurray, has already been given.

Although Caltrans’ decision to give up the median strip might appear to be self-defeating, the agency may have had no other choice. “We’re not in the business of trying to ram things down peoples’ throats,” said Kilmurray. “We might be able to get through the environmental process that way, but we couldn’t get funding without some kind of consensus.”

Kilmurray and other officials suggest that without consensus, they might wind up with a road project that caters to each community’s desires but overlooks regional needs. That could lead, for example, to a six-lane road in the Los Angeles section of Santa Monica Boulevard and a narrower, four-lane road in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

“Obviously, we’d prefer to have everyone’s cooperation and proceed on a regional scale,” Kilmurray said. “But the process is flexible enough to allow widening only in some parts.”

In West Hollywood, officials are more interested in traffic management, which would include projects such as computer-synchronization of traffic lights and the widening of intersections. “If we had those two things, I suspect we could improve the traffic flow on the boulevard substantially, without any major widening,” said City Manager Paul Brotzman.

And in Los Angeles, Councilman Yaroslavsky would prefer to see widening all along the boulevard but can also foresee the city as the only jurisdiction accepting that alternative.

Yaroslavsky believes that if Los Angeles is the only community that widens its stretch of the boulevard, Beverly Hills could “become the narrow part of the hourglass. It would put the traffic pressure on them. That would be where the traffic would slow.”

For now, Caltrans engineers and other officials who support a regional answer to traffic congestion on the boulevard are still trying to build their a consensus. At 7:30 p.m. Nov. 26, in a public hearing on the environmental study at Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles, they will again make their pitch.

“My big fear is that the only way we’ll get a consensus is for the problem to get so intolerable there is no other choice,” said Supervisor Edelman. “It would be a shame to have to wait until then, when we could start on it now.”