L.A. Supervisors Ask CHP to Aim Radar at Deadly Stretch of 126

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to ask the California Highway Patrol to use radar to enforce the 55-m.p.h. speed limit on a five-mile stretch of California 126 in the Santa Clarita Valley where four people have died in recent months.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said speeding has reached “unacceptable proportions” on the winding, two-lane highway between the Golden State Freeway in Castaic and the Ventura County line, leading to an alarming number of accidents.

Antonovich included Newhall’s Placerita Canyon Road, a twisting, two-lane thoroughfare that connects Sierra Highway with San Fernando Road, in his motion requesting CHP radar enforcement for a year.

Jo Anne Darcy, Antonovich’s field deputy in the area, said there continue to be many accidents caused by speeding despite efforts to slow traffic on Placerita Canyon Road. CHP officers recently issued 81 speeding tickets on the road in one day, she said.

Radar Patrol by End of Year

If approved by the California State Transportation Commission, radar could be in use on the highway by the end of the year, a CHP spokesman said.

CHP Officer Harry Ingold said radar was proposed for the highway because of the CHP’s success in reducing accidents on the same route in Ventura County. The CHP began using radar to discourage speeding on a 22-mile stretch of California 126 between Santa Paula and the Los Angeles County line in late 1984.

According to CHP statistics, one person died in a traffic accident on the Ventura County side of the highway during the first four months of this year; 11 people were killed during the same period in 1984, when radar was not being used. Accident statistics for the highway in Los Angeles County are being compiled, Ingold said.

“When we do have an accident there, it’s usually quite spectacular because it’s most often a head-on collision,” Ingold said.

Father, Daughter Killed

Among the highway’s latest victims in Los Angeles County were a Canyon Country man and his teen-age daughter who died earlier this month when the motorcycle they were riding swerved across the highway’s center line and collided head-on with a van.

An Arcadia couple were killed and their two children seriously injured Aug. 17 when a driver allegedly crossed the highway’s center divider at high speed and collided head-on with their vehicle. The Sylmar man whose car hit the couple’s van faces felony drunk-driving charges.

‘Waiting for Improvements’

Ingold attributed the decrease in accidents on California 126 in Ventura County in part to a widening of the road there. “We’re waiting for improvements on our side,” he said.

California 126 was the first state highway on which radar was used, according to the CHP. In its only other use of radar in Los Angeles County, the CHP earlier this year began a radar crackdown on speeding on Kanan Road in Agoura Hills and on Pacific Coast Highway in the Malibu area, Officer Jill Angel said.