Study Will Track Encino Hills Motorists : Commute: Residents say freeway refugees are cutting through and clogging their streets. The one-day study may lead to some solutions.

For years, residents of Encino’s affluent hillside neighborhoods have complained bitterly about commuters cutting through their quiet side streets to avoid the logjammed interchange of the Ventura and San Diego freeways.

This month, in what is believed will be the most extensive survey of its kind, the city Department of Traffic will try to trace the source of the trouble by charting not only the number of cars on hillside streets but also their origins and destinations.

“It’s not a matter of looking for the bad guy; it’s just understanding the route people take to get to their destinations,” said Thomas Jones, the senior transportation engineer who is designing the study. “A lot of it may be generated by the hillside population itself.”

The one-day survey--which will be conducted on a date and at locations that have yet to be decided--will measure traffic between the San Diego Freeway and Topanga Canyon, including the 19 square miles of Encino and Tarzana.

Woodland Hills may be included if necessary, Jones said.

The plan calls for workers to fan out through the area during the morning rush hour and record the license-plate numbers of cars and the times they enter hillside streets.

Other counters, standing at the streets’ opposite ends, will record the license plates of the cars as they leave.

That will enable the surveyors to determine whether complainers and commuters are one and the same.

Results will be submitted to Councilman Marvin Braude, who represents the area.

Traffic foes, including the 400-member Encino Hillside Traffic Safety Organization, hope the study will prompt short-term solutions such as more stop signs and restrictions on turns.

Ultimately, however, the group remains committed to having the dirt portion of Mulholland Drive west of Encino paved--a proposal that has provoked fistfights between proponents and environmentalists and residents in neighboring Tarzana.

The group has been pushing for a decade to have about 3 miles of Mulholland west of Encino Hills Drive paved in the belief that the resulting, mostly east-west cross-mountain route for commuters from Tarzana and Woodland Hills would ease the burden on Encino side streets.

“The idea of the study is to see if there are any immediate measures that can be done to control the traffic,” said Madeline DeAntonio, the traffic group’s president. “But it is not in lieu of the Mulholland Drive plan. We still expect the paving of Mulholland.”

For now, they are getting a traffic survey that officials say is unusual.

“This is the largest I know of for a neighborhood study, probably the whole city,” Jones said.

Cindy Miscikowski, Braude’s chief deputy, said it is unusual for a traffic survey to track destinations instead of merely counting the number of cars.

“There is clearly a sense of a different kind of traffic problem,” Miscikowski said. “And it’s something they want to look at with a new set of eyes.”

Although traffic jams are a problem citywide, Encino residents say they, in particular, are being victimized by freeway refugees.

Denizens of this world of tennis bracelets, French manicures and Gucci loafers say they are hardest hit because their streets abut the Ventura-San Diego Freeway interchange as well as Sepulveda Boulevard, the original and still popular route from the San Fernando Valley into the Basin.

The apparent escape hatch favored by commuters heading east on the Ventura Freeway toward the Westside and downtown is to exit at Louise Avenue and head south for the hills.

They then wend their way past lavishly landscaped lots on winding narrow streets.

One popular shortcut goes from Louise, along side streets to Hayvenhurst Avenue and then on Calneva Drive to Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland eastbound leads to the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel and onto the southbound San Diego Freeway.

On a recent morning, the area of spacious, country-style homes resembled the narrow end of a funnel, with cars lined up bumper to bumper on the network of side streets leading to the crucial thoroughfares.

“There are mornings we can’t get out of our driveway. There are mornings we sit in our driveway 10, 15 minutes while a stream of cars goes down the hill. It’s exasperating,” said Natalie Levy, who lives at the corner of two streets that are part of one of the busiest routes up to Mulholland.

Levy said the traffic is not only a nuisance but a danger.

She and other residents cited broken fences and mailboxes, delayed ambulances and firetrucks--and worse--in a litany of traffic headaches.

On May 19, 1988, at about 6:30 p.m., a commuter’s car plowed into the Levys’ kitchen and supper table just moments before the family sat down for a barbecued meal.

No one was seriously hurt. According to Levy, the driver was taking a shortcut to her home in Woodland Hills.

“Five seconds later, we would’ve been sitting there. Need I say more?” Levy said.

Levy, DeAntonio and other activists pleaded not to have the side streets’ names published for fear of enticing even more commuters.

Some blame the book “LA Shortcuts: The Guidebook for Drivers Who Hate to Wait” for exacerbating an existing problem and teaching some motorists a new route, DeAntonio said.

But even she acknowledges that the problem has been growing along with population in the area.