Battle Lines Are Drawn Over Traffic Barricades : Toluca Lake: Disagreement has erupted over a plan, already given preliminary approval, to end commuter shortcuts through a residential area. It calls for closing off seven streets.

Attorney David Stitz does not allow his 14-year-old daughter to ride her bike on the shady suburban streets of her family’s Toluca Lake neighborhood for fear that she will be run down by the commuter traffic that roars by every workday.

“I hear the screeching tires and I shudder,” said Stitz, who with other residents has been fighting for years to stem the flow of outside traffic into his neighborhood.

The magnet bringing the commuters to Stitz’s neighborhood of well-kept $500,000 houses in the southwest corner of Burbank near the Hollywood Hills is the nearby Media District, which is rapidly becoming a major West Coast center for the entertainment industry.

Last month, residents who have complained to City Hall for nearly a decade won preliminary approval for a drastic plan: sealing off the neighborhood with traffic barriers.

But now, a battle has erupted among the residents themselves over whether closing off the seven streets in the neighborhood near the studios and offices is such a good idea. The plan calls for barricading the six east-west streets paralleling Riverside Drive to the southeast. Rose Street also would be blocked near the entrance to the Lakeside Country Club.

Residents say that the barricades they have wanted for eight years will reroute commuters onto larger streets--such as Riverside Drive and Pass Avenue--and will restore the peace and quiet that many homeowners said attracted them to the neighborhood in the first place.

“This is a neighborhood,” said Mary O’Hare, who is among the most vocal of the barricade proponents. “We don’t want it to be just another cut-through.”

A traffic study prepared for the Media District said barricades “would effectively eliminate” cut-through traffic in Toluca Lake “since the only access would be from the west or from the north.”

But several residents, who live mostly on the north end of the neighborhood, are fighting to keep the streets open. They say traffic problems caused by commuters are not that bad, and if barricades are erected, their streets will actually become busier as traffic is funneled onto them.

“Somebody has got to pay for it,” said Barbara Spork, who has lived in the neighborhood for 50 years and recently circulated a petition seeking the signatures of residents opposed to the plan. “We’re going to pay for it dearly.”

In response to the opposition, supporters of the barricades said the traffic on Rose after installation of the barriers will not be as high as current levels.

The problems are caused by drivers using Barham Boulevard as an alternative to the Hollywood Freeway in the busy Cahuenga Pass. They often cut through the residential area to avoid traffic congestion that develops on Olive Avenue, one of the main streets in the Media District. Drivers heading to the Media District from the west use Moorpark Street instead of the Ventura Freeway and filter through the shady lanes south of Riverside Drive to Olive Avenue, which borders The Burbank Studios.

The battle lines over the barricades appear to be drawn not only by where people live within the neighborhood, but also roughly between generations.

Many of the most vocal supporters of the plan are relative newcomers to the neighborhood, thirtysomething professionals with young families who have moved in within the last five to 10 years. Similarly, many of those opposed to the barricades are older and have lived for decades in the area, described by one resident as an “Ozzie and Harriet” neighborhood of single-family houses built in the 1930s and 1940s.

According to traffic engineers, the streets attract cut-through traffic largely because they run parallel to major arteries. Newer neighborhoods are designed to keep traffic on major streets and away from residential areas.

Supporters of the barricades have said as many as 5,000 cars each day speed along their streets. They say that 80% of those cars are commuters from outside the neighborhood.

But Burbank traffic engineer Ron Morris said a recent count showed that only about 2,600 cars per day travel the busiest sections of Rose Street in the area, adding that the street is designed to accommodate between 2,000 and 3,000 cars each day.

Traffic is expected to increase, however, as new projects that will nearly double the existing commercial development in the Media District are built over the next 20 years. “We are unfortunately the way around,” resident Robert Olson said.

Plans for the temporary barriers will be presented to the City Council on Oct. 2, when council members are expected to direct city staff to erect the barricades for 90 days. At the end of that period, the council will decide whether to make the barricades permanent and turn the streets into cul-de-sacs.

Burbank Fire Chief Stan Nelson said any barricades erected would allow emergency and service vehicles, such as ambulances and garbage trucks, to get through. Even so, he said, limiting access to the neighborhood to a single street could be dangerous during an emergency such as an earthquake that might require an evacuation.

“We’re not happy with it, but we’re going to see if we can work with it,” he said.

Brad Howard, a neighborhood resident who began fighting for the barricades eight years ago, said blocking the streets will allow Toluca Lake, which straddles the cities of Los Angeles and Burbank, to remain intact as a community.

Howard said he remembers riding his bike unsupervised through the neighborhood as a child, something that he and other parents said they would never allow their children to do today.

Answering residents who shrug their shoulders at increasing traffic, O’Hare said, “Traffic is a fact of life, but the issue is if you have too much traffic, you no longer have a neighborhood.”

NEXT STEP

A proposal to install temporary traffic control barricades on seven residential streets near Burbank’s Media District is to be presented to the Burbank City Council on Oct. 2. At that time, the council is expected to approve blocking neighborhood streets for 90 days. After studying the effect of the temporary barriers, the council will consider whether to make the barricades permanent and turn the streets into cul-de-sacs.