Need a Stop Sign? Call a Traffic Engineer, Shift Your Patience Into Idle

Commuters inched forward, part of a mile-long backup. Several drivers jerk-stopped their cars, too late to slip through the green light. One frustrated pickup driver cut off another car, and the two motorists instantly exchanged obscene gestures. A gas station operator grumbled that business was down. A traffic cop said ticket tallies were up.

Amid the commotion at the intersection of Victory and Sepulveda boulevards last week, there stood soft-spoken Eleanor Pui Ng, stopwatch and clipboard in hand, preparing to tinker once more with the commutes of the 65,666 motorists who pass through the intersection each day.

At a time when horn-honking, fist-flailing traffic woes are a prime target of complaints all over the San Fernando Valley, Pui Ng is a member of a little-known but powerful cadre of Los Angeles city traffic engineers that quietly disperses onto the roadways every workday on a sometimes futile, occasionally victorious mission to fix troubled streets.

“Maybe if I take two more seconds from Sepulveda it will help Victory,” Pui Ng said, eyeing the traffic-signal timer. “Maybe 2 1/2 seconds. You know, sometimes this can be very delicate. A few seconds can screw everything up.”

The traffic engineer’s judgment can alter the length of the backup on major avenues, the safety of an intersection and the profits of a business person. Some residents, desperate for traffic improvements, plead with engineers for relief because their life styles, even their lives, are at stake.

“I take my life in my own hands when I make a turn,” wrote one resident who lives near Mulholland Drive. “We must have a left turn arrow.”

“My street was a race track. I was afraid to go jogging,” said Stanton Bellard.

“Customers can’t reach us because the alley is blocked off,” said David Lynch, the operator of a drive-through hotdog stand, asking engineers to settle a dispute between competing restaurants.

Hundreds of similar complaints create the traffic engineer’s raison d’etre, officials said. Although the complaint-line telephone number--818-989-8441--is not publicized like a hot line, hundreds of Valley residents have managed to find it, creating a backlog of more than 1,500 complaints that would take up to six months to deplete, city transportation officials said.

“Quite frankly, we are buried in answering requests from the public,” said Ed Rowe, general manager of the Department of Transportation. “In terms of dealing with the public, the engineers are on the front line with an incredibly wide range of requests, some of them very sticky situations.”

While high-level transportation officials handle mammoth San Fernando Valley traffic improvement projects--such as the selection of a rail route, the widening of the Ventura Freeway and the installation of a multimillion-dollar traffic-signal synchronization program--traffic engineers often deal in minutiae: stop signs, red curb zones, left turn arrows and median stripes.

But their workload shows that the popularity of the simple street sign cannot be underestimated.

In January alone, about 200 Valley residents requested new street signs.

About 100 more wanted some type of new pavement marking and about 40 residents requested a new traffic signal.