Woodland Hills Homeowners Win Yearlong Battle to Trim Speed Limit

A yearlong effort by residents to put the brakes on cars speeding along one of Woodland Hills’ oldest streets paid off Wednesday.

Los Angeles Transportation Department officials lowered the speed limit for a narrow, meandering section of Canoga Avenue in response to a safety campaign begun by homeowners last year.

The residents acted after a 16-year-old boy was killed in one accident and a 5-year-old boy was injured by a hit-and-run motorist in another.

The new speed limit between Dumetz Road and Mulholland Drive is 25 m.p.h., traffic engineers said. The posted limit had been 30 m.p.h.

Transportation engineers who installed six new speed limit signs in the area Wednesday said recent traffic surveys had shown that both traffic volume and traveling speeds were creeping upward.

“I got a lump in my throat when I drove home from work tonight and saw the first 25-m.p.h. sign,” said Gia Koontz, an organizer of a year-old group called CARS--for Canoga Avenue Residents for Safety.

“I saw it the exact time they were nominating Jesse Jackson for President on the car radio. What a moment. . . . I let out a whoop and slowed my car down to 25. By the time I got home, I had a caravan of 10 cars behind me wanting to pass.”

Although Canoga Avenue becomes a broad business street farther north in Woodland Hills and Canoga Park, it has the look of a country road at its south end near the Woodland Hills Country Club, where the new speed limit was imposed.

Built along the bottom of a narrow ravine in the mid-1920s by Victor Giraud, the original developer of Woodland Hills, the roadway is two lanes wide and lacks sidewalks and shoulders. It is lined with oaks and peppertrees and is bordered by single-family homes.

These days, it has become a main north-south route serving as the primary access to hundreds of homes in a hilly area 1 1/2 miles south of the Ventura Freeway.

After the serious accidents last year, leaders of the safety group polled 73 families living in the area and discovered that three-fourths of them had witnessed recent traffic accidents. Two-thirds had suffered property damage such as uprooted trees, shrubs and mailboxes due to car accidents.

Between 1970 and 1987, residents witnessed three fatal accidents and reported many crashes into homes near two Canoga Avenue cross-streets, Golondrina and Rios, the survey showed.

The Canoga Avenue residents were joined in their campaign by a Tarzana man, Rob Lessin, whose son Brian was the 16-year-old killed on the avenue June 6, 1987.

Brian Lessin, a Taft High School student, died when his car veered out of control on the narrow roadway and smashed into a retaining wall in a front yard. “Death is a pretty extreme punishment,” Rob Lessin said during an emotion-charged safety meeting last summer between residents and city officials.

Added Larry Allen, whose 5-year-old son, Eric, was struck by a hit-and-run driver near the same spot: “We can’t give in to the guys who go 80 m.p.h. on this street.”

At that session, homeowners urged that Canoga Avenue be closed off at Mulholland, effectively turning it into a cul-de-sac. They also demanded that stop signs be installed at several cross streets to further slow traffic.

Traffic engineers balked at the closure because the roadway is needed for access to nearby hillside neighborhoods. They also ruled out stop signs, explaining it is not their policy to use such signs only to slow traffic on through streets.

They agreed to restripe the mile-long stretch of Canoga Avenue south of Dumetz Road, however. They also agreed to install raised safety markers to outline curves. Los Angeles Police were assigned for a time last year to crack down on speeders.

Wednesday’s lowered speed limit delighted homeowners--if not motorists.

“Even though it’s very difficult for the city to enforce it and people will still probably go too fast, at least now we know that when we petition the city and go about it in a responsible way, the city responds,” Koontz said.

Colwin Flowers, an associate city traffic engineer, said Wednesday that the new speed limit should have a quick effect on traffic, since a recent speed survey taken by city engineers along the avenue showed that many of the 1,855 motorists who travel the road each day average about 35 m.p.h.