Cities Collide Head-On Over Street-Closure Plan : Traffic: Torrance has proposed blockading a route frequently used by Palos Verdes Peninsula residents.

It’s a messy fight between cities, with Palos Verdes Estates and Rolling Hills Estates in an uproar over Torrance’s plan to barricade a popular shortcut for peninsula commuters.

Torrance officials contend that Via Valmonte is a residential street that has improperly been turned into a major thoroughfare. To solve the problem, they intend to install a gate and slam it shut to everything but emergency vehicles.

Such a closure would eliminate 4,200 daily trips through residential neighborhoods where Torrance meets Palos Verdes Estates, according to an environmental study ordered by Torrance.

But the blockade would throw more traffic onto the already heavily used Palos Verdes Drive North and Hawthorne Boulevard, say officials from the two Palos Verdes Peninsula cities, whose residents are unhappy with the idea.

The yearlong flap highlights problems that have been created by continued commercial and residential development on the peninsula and the traffic faced by commuters living in the affluent bedroom communities there.

The results of the $30,000 study on the proposed closure are now being circulated for comment. Traffic on Hawthorne and Palos Verdes Drive North is already severely congested, the study says, and during rush hour, cars are backed up in long queues at major intersections.

Closing Via Valmonte will cause more congestion on the alternate routes and additional air pollution from cars taking the longer and slower route, the study reports, adding, “These impacts are not irreversible and are not considered to be significant.”

For thousands who live “up on the hill” and commute to work, there are only half a dozen through routes on and off the entire peninsula. Many drivers use Via Valmonte, coming down out of Palos Verdes Estates on the steep, curving road into Torrance.

“There are just too many cars coming too fast down around those curves,” Larry Schneider, a Via Valmonte homeowner, said in a recent interview. Several times cars have careened into his yard, he said. “We’ve been fighting for 15 years to get the street closed.”

Then Schneider vented some of the “them-or-us” kind of hostility that lies so close to the surface on both sides of this long-running argument.

“They’ve got gated neighborhoods up there so we riffraff can’t drive by their houses. If they don’t want a locked gate down here, tell them to take off their locks too,” he said.

Peninsula cities’ reaction to the Torrance study was immediate and negative. Rolling Hills Estates City Manager Doug Prichard said the closure’s effect on peninsula traffic would be severe.

“This would put us over the edge,” Prichard said. Rush-hour traffic in his city would come to a virtual standstill on Hawthorne and Palos Verdes Drive North, he said.

Palos Verdes Estates officials accused their Torrance counterparts of intentionally distorting the facts to make it look as if Via Valmonte were a quiet residential street gone bad.

“They (Torrance) totally misrepresent the street in their closure proposal,” said Palos Verdes Estates City Manager James Hendrickson. He said Via Valmonte was originally Hawthorne Avenue and has been a primary access route to “the hill” since the 1920s.

According to Hendrickson, Torrance officials are determined to close the street, no matter what. Torrance officials deny this.

“That simply isn’t true; we haven’t made up our minds,” said Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert. “We have a record of being very fair.”

She and others argue that the hill cities have not done enough to increase the carrying capacities of their existing streets, perhaps by widening Palos Verdes Drive North.

“The problem has intensified as all the new development intensified,” she said. “There are more and more cars coming down from the peninsula. . . . It’s a major problem.”

Not everyone in Torrance agrees that Via Valmonte should be closed, however. The Torrance Chamber of Commerce and some merchants along Hawthorne say putting a gate across the street would be bad for business.

And at least one Torrance city traffic expert says the traffic on Via Valmonte isn’t excessive.

“This is more a quality-of-life problem than a traffic problem,” said Arthur Horkay, director of the city’s transportation department. He said that although Via Valmonte residents complain about noise and traffic, city records don’t show a high accident rate there. Traffic counts “are about normal” for such a road, he said.

The environmental impact report makes no recommendations. It does suggest, however, that the best alternative to closing off the road would be to erect “no left turn” signs and barriers, to keep cars on Via Valmonte from turning north onto Hawthorne.

Critics say such signs would still eliminate the street as a morning commuting route. Procedurally, both sides have until mid-September to review and comment on the environmental impact report. Torrance will then hold more public hearings. A final vote by the council is not expected until late fall, officials said.