Gridlock Near Soka Likely, Study Shows : Calabasas: A report says Las Virgenes Road would need to be six lanes. It also says traffic would be minimal if the school housed all students on-campus.

A new traffic study commissioned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Foundation predicts that the proposed expansion of Soka University in Calabasas will cause gridlock on surrounding streets unless the two-lane Las Virgenes Road becomes a six-lane thoroughfare.

But the study, part of the conservancy’s quest to acquire the land for a national park headquarters, also shows that traffic would be minimal if the school’s current plans hold--namely to house all 4,400 students on the 580-acre campus.

That finding helps bolster arguments by Soka officials that a residential campus would not severely impact the rural surroundings, especially if the school proceeds with previously announced plans to control traffic by limiting the number of cars allowed on campus and by promoting bicycling and van-pooling.

Joseph T. Edmiston, the conservancy’s executive director, defended the study’s gloomier predictions by saying county planners will be unlikely to approve enough dormitory space for all 4,400 students, thus necessitating some commuters. Edmiston also said the county must look at the possibility that some students will choose to live off-campus or will leave campus for social outings.

“I think students are students,” Edmiston said. “What are you going to do, send somebody packing back to Paris or Tokyo or Indiana because they bought a car?”

Festivals and symposiums held by the school, which in the past have drawn hundreds of people out from urban Los Angeles, could cause traffic jams at odd hours, Edmiston said. Only peak traffic hours night and morning, Monday through Friday, were considered in the study.

Soka spokeswoman Bernetta Reade said the school did not want to comment on the details of the conservancy traffic study, prepared by Barton-Aschman Associates Inc., because it is “very premature” and “hypothetical.”

“It is not based on reality, nor is it based on the plans that we have submitted to the county,” Reade said. “There are traffic studies that the university will be required to provide to the county, and the county will review those. . . . That’s the appropriate time and place for this discussion.”

Tokyo-based Soka University began purchasing land in Calabasas in 1986, eventually amassing 580 acres at an estimated cost of at least $46 million. Last year, school officials announced plans to expand from a short-term 80-student English-language program, accommodated in existing buildings, to a 5,000-student, four-year college.

On May 2, the school took the first formal step toward expansion by filing a request with Los Angeles County for environmental clearance for a 4,400-student campus. The proposal included 84 buildings, 44 of which would be dormitories.

The school’s plans shrank by 600 students to accommodate a park headquarters on 71 acres along Las Virgenes Road, a plan that park officials already have rejected because it adds park traffic to school traffic.

Instead, the conservancy is trying to persuade Soka officials to sell 248 acres of the land for use as headquarters of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Les Hardie, president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, said the traffic study appeared to support his organization’s contention that the university is too big for the area, because the only way to lessen traffic is to build more dormitories.

“In trying to reduce the traffic, that destroys the land, and in trying to preserve the land, that destroys the traffic,” Hardie said.

The traffic study took into consideration existing and future traffic along the two two-lane thoroughfares that intersect at the school: Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road, which becomes Malibu Canyon Road as it heads southwest toward the coast.

It evaluated the impact of adding between 1,000 and 5,000 students to the area by the year 2015, Soka’s target date for full expansion. The study did not consider a student body of 4,400, because that proposal had not been made at the time the consultant was hired, Edmiston said.

It concluded that streets in the area already are approaching gridlock during rush hour. Even without any expansion of the school, Las Virgenes Road will need to be widened by at least one and in some spots up to four lanes to accommodate 21 other planned residential and commercial construction projects, the consultant found.

Hardie said even that widening may be impossible because of the area’s sheer walls.

“The cost would be absolutely astronomical,” he said. “And it would be physically impossible in some areas.”

But assuming that those road improvements did occur, the study then considered what additional strains Soka University would place on the area’s road system.

If more than 4,000 students commuted, an assumption Soka spokesman Reade said is completely wrong, Las Virgenes Road would have to be widened to a six-lane road in some sections, the study showed. If 5,000 students commuted, it would have to be five or six lanes from the Ventura Freeway to the Pacific Coast Highway.

If 5,000 students lived on campus, the study predicted that 650 cars bringing instructors and other services would travel into the campus during the morning rush hour, and 200 would leave during the evening rush hour.

That additional traffic would require an added lane southbound on Las Virgenes Road north of Mulholland Highway and another right-turn lane westbound on Las Virgenes Road at the Mulholland Highway intersection. That lane would be in addition to a new lane necessary due to current development plans.

However, if even half of the students commuted to campus daily, the study showed that Las Virgenes Road would have to be widened by one lane northbound to the Ventura Freeway. This would mean that, with the additional lanes resulting from already planned growth, two to three lanes would be added to current road widths. Also, the Mulholland Highway intersection would need at least three additional turn lanes, for cars headed west, north and south.