‘Major’ Tangle Mostly a Minor Inconvenience

The wedding of Bud Stuckert and Debbie Talbert probably will be remembered as something more than the day the florist was late and everyone had to wait.

At any rate, the florist got caught in a traffic slowdown caused by construction on the Ventura Freeway while en route to the couple’s Saturday morning wedding at the Lautrec restaurant in Woodland Hills.

“It kind of crammed everything real close,” said Stuckert, 30, of Thousand Oaks, who had warned the wedding party about the construction in a rash of last-minute calls the night before. “The ceremony was delayed 15 to 20 minutes.”

Freeway Tales

Stuckert and other San Fernando Valley residents told similar stories Saturday of surviving the inconveniences of the freeway construction. Besides being late, some drove a little farther to get where they were going. Many stayed away altogether.

City and state transportation officials said many drivers apparently listened to the warnings about traffic jams and stayed clear of the freeway between White Oak and Canoga avenues.

Transportation officials had feared that the start of stepped-up weekend construction on the freeway would cause a massive pileup. It did not, but traffic nevertheless was slow.

The closure of three of the freeway’s four lanes, roughly between White Oak and Canoga avenues, was scheduled from midnight Friday to 11 a.m. Saturday, although the lanes reopened earlier than expected. The closures were scheduled to resume from midnight Saturday until 11 a.m. today. The same pattern is expected each weekend through the end of July, except for the Fourth of July weekend.

Joshua Kaminski, 19, of Woodland Hills, was returning home from an evening of playing pool in Sherman Oaks about 12:30 a.m. Saturday when he saw the brake lights and the closed lanes on the westbound freeway. The easy solution was to get off, he said.

“It was no big deal,” he said.

Sammy Shako, 24, of Encino, left home for work Saturday morning to find that officials had closed the freeway entry ramp he usually takes. He was bound for a liquor store he manages on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. The 9 a.m. opening time came and went, and still no Sammy.

“I was about 10 minutes late, but that’s OK,” said Shako, who took Victory Boulevard, one of the State Department of Transportation’s recommended alternative routes. “Maybe I lost a customer or two.”

As Shako readied the store for business, Ron Tanzman was arriving for work at a car dealership several blocks away. He, too, was late, but not as glib about the construction.

“I forgot about it until after I got on the freeway,” said Tanzman, 20, of Sepulveda. “It was terrible,” he said of a bottleneck he encountered on the freeway west of Balboa Boulevard.