Congestion Debated : La Jolla Residents Try to Put Brake on Traffic Plan

When visitors return home from this seaside mecca to relate the wonders of surf and palms, quaint shops and imposing mansions, they often end their narratives on a sour note about “that awful traffic!”

But residents of this affluent peninsula turned out in force this week to oppose what city engineers believe is a viable solution to easing La Jolla’s traffic congestion.

Virginia Grizzle, 44, a resident and former school administrator, has long championed the proposed remedy: a four-lane roadway linking Pacific Beach on the south with UC San Diego and Torrey Pines Mesa to the north on a winding path over the eastern slopes of Soledad Mountain and spanning Ardath Road.

At a debate Monday evening that packed La Jolla High School’s Parker Auditorium to capacity and a bit more, Grizzle faced a hostile crowd and some seasoned opposing debaters. She settled for polite applause and a few muffled groans and hisses as she pleaded with the crowd to judge the proposal unemotionally and to consider the consequences: gridlock on all major streets leading in and out of La Jolla.

Her criticism of other tourist towns for failing to ease their traffic-flow problems and her description of a New England town’s traffic snarl as so bad “that I wouldn’t go back there in a million years” brought laughter and applause from the overflow audience of about 600. That is what many La Jollans want--enough traffic to discourage all but the most tenacious from exiting the freeway and heading through their community.

Grizzle is convinced that it isn’t the tourists out for a drive or the surfers heading for the beach that are clogging La Jolla’s streets. If so, she reasoned, why do the worst hours of congestion occur at peak job commuting hours rather than when the surf’s up or the sunset is nigh? La Jollans are clogging La Jolla’s main arteries, not tourists, not shoppers, not surfers, not students, Grizzle argues.

Why not make it easier on townsfolk to get to and from their jobs in Sorrento Valley, at UCSD, in the Golden Triangle or downtown San Diego? Why not build them a shortcut that will get them to work and back again without traversing the dreaded Ardath triangle?

The Ardath triangle is the junction of three major arterials into La Jolla--Ardath Road, La Jolla Shores Drive and Torrey Pines Road--which converge to form the only direct access into La Jolla from the north and east. The proposed north-south road would link with Ardath Road and allow many motorists to avoid La Jolla’s worst traffic bottleneck, Grizzle said, and hopefully would relieve the traffic pressures that now create mile-long waiting lines of cars at the three-way intersection.

“This is the only sensible answer to partially solving the traffic problem,” Grizzle said, repeating the arguments she has given over the past two decades of debate over the project.

Her partner on the “pro” side of the Ardath overpass debate was less firm. Attorney William Nelson admitted that “this is probably one of those debates where no one’s mind will be changed.” He seconded Grizzle’s arguments that La Jolla is no longer a peaceful little village of quiet streets. It is a bustling, growing community that must face up to its growth. “And, the time is now,” he stressed.

Leading the attack on the project were think-tank scientist Richard Dahlberg and attorney Karl ZoBell.

The road would cut through Mt. Soledad Park near the historic landmark the Soledad Cross. It would leave a gash along the native slopes of La Jolla’s protective mountain and engorge the mountain heights with the automobiles of non-residents seeking to get from here to there more quickly, they argued.

It would require the excavation of 400,000 cubic yards of earth from the historic mountain--an amount equal to a mound the size of a football field and 250 feet high. It would run through quiet residential neighborhoods and virgin parkland, ruining both, the opposing debaters argued.

Although it might lessen congestion on existing La Jolla streets for a while, it would eventually have the reverse effect, Dahlberg argued, because of the oft-proven principle that “traffic will increase . . . (and) restore the original level of inconvenience.” More roads mean more cars, he said. More cars mean more congestion.

ZoBell took up the theme, pointing out that traffic congestion could be considered the price one pays for living in La Jolla. Building this costly--$5-million or more--project would do little to ease La Jolla’s traffic jams, he said, and any help would be temporary.

“Both sides agree that there are no attractive solutions (to La Jolla’s traffic problems),” ZoBell said, “so why do anything?”

The winners in applause and in a show of hands at the end of the great debate were the project’s opponents. Only a few hands were raised tentatively as favoring the Ardath overpass, and those hands were quickly lowered as most of the audience gave out a disapproving groan.

But Grizzle may have gained a few powerful allies--including ZoBell--in her effort to have the issue put before the entire population of La Jolla at a straw vote during the June primary or November general election. ZoBell said that Grizzle’s vote proposal was “something that I think we can all support.”

San Diego City Councilman Mike Gotch, who, with Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, shares La Jolla’s 30,000 or so constituents, wondered aloud after the debate whether the vote was necessary when the community opinion at the meeting had been overwhelmingly in opposition. The cost of a communitywide vote--$8,000--would fill a lot of potholes, he pointed out.

“It’s time to put this issue to rest,” said David Ish, executive director of the La Jolla Town Council, the main sponsor of the Monday debate. “It seems that the only way to do that, without one side claiming that the other has packed the house, is to put the issue to a vote of everybody in town.”

City engineers, who have recommended approval of the Ardath overpass and north-south road construction, are awaiting marching orders on whether to budget planning and engineering money for this project and a dozen or so other less controversial ones aimed at widening La Jolla thoroughfares to accommodate traffic.

One traffic planner, an expert on the ways of La Jolla folk, advised, “Let them argue it out as long as they want. Let them vote on it, too. But don’t waste any money on planning anything that would put one more square foot of pavement in La Jolla.”