LACK OF LINES ROILS TRAFFIC

Complaints of collisions and near misses on a stretch of the San Fernando Valley’s busiest street sent Los Angeles traffic engineers scurrying for their paintbrushes Wednesday night.

Officials were hoping a 1 3/4-mile section of Ventura Boulevard in Encino--where lane lines were sandblasted away to make room for an extra traffic lane--would be re-striped by this morning.

Without lane stripes to guide them, some motorists were charting their own course along the street.

“You can’t tell which lane was which,” Ross Crowe, an Encino building manager, said Wednesday. “When I saw a car coming right at me, I was wondering whether I was in a lane that was going or coming.”

The project to add lanes is part of an effort to ease Valley traffic congestion, initiated last month by Mayor Tom Bradley. By slightly reducing the width of existing lanes, engineers were able to add an extra westbound lane.

Weekend Work

Traffic officials began eliminating the old lane lines three weeks ago. They have worked only on weekends to avoid inconveniencing merchants and disrupting nearby homeowners, said Tom Swire, the city’s district transportation engineer for the West Valley area.

“We had to wait until all the sandblasting was done to repaint,” Swire said. “We couldn’t repaint it in segments because there would have been 5-foot jogs in the striping at intersections that would have been pretty dangerous.”

Officials decided to hurry up the repainting Wednesday after receiving numerous complaints from motorists that the stretch between Firmament Avenue and Balboa Boulevard was also pretty dangerous without stripes.

Some of the callers blamed the lack of lines for a collision Tuesday night near Gloria Avenue and a fatal crash Saturday night near Libbit Avenue.

“It’s like Russian roulette out there. It’s very hazardous. They shouldn’t just grind the lanes out and leave them,” said Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, who witnessed Tuesday’s collision.

Los Angeles police had no details Wednesday of that crash. But they denied that the lack of lane markings contributed to Saturday’s collision, in which one person was killed and two others were slightly injured.

Motorist Gretchen Wilson, 40, of Los Angeles died after she veered into oncoming traffic when she lapsed into a diabetic coma, said Police Sgt. John O’Toole, a traffic investigator.

Others who regularly travel through Encino on Ventura Boulevard said they will welcome the extra lane--and the new lane markers.

“Without the stripes, people are veering all over the place out there,” said Russell Peters, who works for a service that delivers legal papers.

Said Rick Edelman, a Federal Express delivery driver, “It’s dog-eat-dog out there.”