Growth Won’t Add to Traffic on Ventura Blvd., Plan Says : Congestion: New businesses would bring more cars, but street improvements would leave rush hours unchanged, planners say. Opponents are skeptical and want strong limits.

Traffic congestion on Ventura Boulevard would be about the same as it is now even if sharply increased commercial development puts an anticipated 30,000 extra motorists onto the street during the afternoon rush-hour peak in coming years, Los Angeles city planners predicted this week.

But some homeowner leaders and other observers believe the city Planning Department’s predictions, contained in a new draft of a plan for controlling growth along Ventura Boulevard, are too optimistic. And if the planners are wrong, gridlock could result, the critics fear.

Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. said city planners’ conclusions that “more development will lead to less traffic problems” were unfounded. “We disagree. Nothing less than a long-term moratorium on development will work,” he said.

Others said that Ventura Boulevard would become another traffic-choked “Wilshire Boulevard” if more drastic countermeasures than those offered by the plan are not implemented.

The traffic situation “will not be dramatically improved but it will not get worse,” Bob Sutton, a senior city planner, told two dozen community leaders Monday as he presented the city Planning Department’s recipe for permitting 8.6 million extra square feet of commercial development along Ventura Boulevard.

The extra commercial development allowed by the department’s proposed Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan--a 44% increase over what exists now--would generate 30,000 more auto trips on the boulevard during the peak afternoon rush hour, bringing the total number of peak trips to 100,000.

But planners say the effect of the increase in commercial development can be offset without causing already clogged traffic to worsen.

That apparent paradox would be resolved by traffic improvement projects implemented to ease the congestion. The $170-million tab for such upgrades would be paid for with fees imposed on developers as a condition of their getting permission to build new projects, city planning officials say.

The more traffic produced by a development, the bigger the fees it would be charged. The fees would vary depending on where along the boulevard the development was located.

The congestion at a third of the 30 major intersections affected by the plan--ranging from the Ventura Freeway ramps at Woodlake Avenue on the west to Barham Boulevard at Cahuenga Boulevard on the east--would be unchanged from what it is today, according to city traffic analysts. At another third of the intersections, the congestion would be worse. Traffic would improve at the remaining intersections.

But Sutton said studies show that nine of the intersections are already at or near gridlock levels. Traffic mitigation measures would eliminate gridlock at four of the nine intersections, he said.

A key element of the Planning Department’s prescription for lessening congestion is to widen many of the 30 major intersections to provide new or additional right- or left-turn lanes. Up to 370 feet along each side of each street at an intersection may need to be purchased to accommodate the widening, the planners said.

But the city’s ability to buy the property needed for widening will depend on the vagaries of development and the willingness of owners to sell, Sutton said. If development is not occurring next to an intersection or if owners there are not ready to sell, widening will be stalled--even if traffic and development problems are growing, he said.

The city typically requires developers to dedicate property for street widening in order to win city approval for their projects.

Sutton said the plan would require formation of a citizens panel to review the plan annually to determine if its controls are working. He also said the city’s planning department can shape development to adjust to the availability of land for street-widening needed to unclog traffic congestion.

Eminent domain, a politically unpopular tool in which the city condemns land and seizes it for public uses, would be used only as a last resort, Sutton said.

San Fernando Valley homeowner leaders said the inadequacies of the plan would turn the Valley’s main street into a hopelessly crowded thoroughfare, wiping out the remaining vestiges of its origins as a pedestrian-oriented local shopping street.

Jerry Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, said: “Widening the boulevard with all these mitigation measures would just put more capacity on the street, and create more of a Wilshire Boulevard than limit development, which is what the plan was supposed to do.”

Silver added: “The planning department wants to build their way out of this problem, and it was them that got us in this hole in the first place.”

However, Ben Reznik, a land-use attorney who represents several developers with large projects along Ventura, said that even if no further development occurs on the boulevard, traffic problems would worsen.

“It all has to do with regional growth,” he said. “More than 50% of the traffic along the boulevard is not related to the boulevard. Places like Simi Valley and Santa Clarita keep on growing, so even if we didn’t do anything, we would still have gridlock.”