Residents Oppose Attempt to Block Shortcuts to UCLA : Traffic: Despite the congestion of parked cars and commuters using their neighborhoods to avoid gridlock, homeowners reject a plan to limit access.

In a rare departure from the trend by neighborhoods to try to close their streets to outsiders, residents of fashionable Holmby Hills have gone to bat to keep their streets open.

A brouhaha over a plan to close 11 residential streets near UCLA to prevent students and faculty from using them as shortcuts to the campus has subsided, with supporters beating a hasty retreat.

But the outcome has left bruised feelings among neighbors while satisfying few.

At issue is how to deal with commuters using the neighborhood’s shaded corridors to dodge the gridlock surrounding the university, including heavily congested Wilshire and Sunset boulevards.

Perhaps most remarkable is that there is a debate at all, given the number of celebrities and others in the wealthy enclave who covet their privacy.

Among the city’s most prestigious areas, Holmby Hills is flanked by the Los Angeles Country Club and UCLA to the east and west, and by Bel-Air Estates and the crowded Wilshire corridor to the north and south.

Producer Aaron Spelling has a 56,000-square-foot house there. Hugh Hefner’s lavish Playboy Mansion on a secluded hilltop has been a fixture for a quarter-century.

At a time when officials say nearly 150 neighborhoods across Los Angeles have applied for gates or barricades, hundreds of Holmby Hills residents--including Hefner and actor Lloyd Bridges--have told their neighborhood association that they don’t want to be closed in.

“I think a lot of us decided the cure was worse than the disease,” Bridges said. “It was just too inconvenient.” He opposed closing even his own street, despite years of tolerating looky-loos who use Star Maps to scout out his house.

But others say Holmby Hills has come under increasing assault from students who speed through its well-adorned streets on their way to classes, and from others bent on escaping the bump-and-grind of Wilshire and Sunset.

Residents fear the problem will only get worse as high-rises continue to sprout in nearby Century City and along Wilshire’s Miracle Mile, and with Fox Studios wanting to expand.

As a cure, the Holmby-Westwood Property Owners Assn. offered a plan to close off all 10 streets entering the neighborhood from Hilgard Avenue--the main artery bordering the east side of UCLA--and another street at Sunset Boulevard. The plan by a consultant hired with city funds would have also restricted turns at three other Sunset locations.

Group officials said the plan was more than a year in the making. To get community support, the group sent five mailers to 1,100 households, advertised in their quarterly newsletter and made countless phone calls, they said.

“We begged people to come” to numerous meetings, said volunteer Susan Meals.

Few did.

But when opponents of the idea suddenly learned a few weeks ago that the group deemed the plan worthy, the result was near frenzy.

Nearly 300 people showed up for a hastily called meeting at a local church to rail against it.

One resident after another complained that they had heard nothing of it, despite the group’s claim to have sent the notices, adding that the closures would make them prisoners in their own neighborhood.

A surgeon groaned that the plan would add 15 minutes to his commute to UCLA Medical Center. Parents said it would wreak havoc on car pools. And nearly everyone complained that it would sever the community from the campus and Westwood Village.

“Wacky!” shouted one woman. “If I had wanted to live in a gated community, I would have moved to Calabassas.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, said his phone rang off the hook from people opposed to the idea.

Yaroslavsky has said that the plan is “dead in the water” unless there is overwhelming support for it on each and every street in the community, something supporters concede they have little chance of obtaining.

It is not the first time that the community has been divided over what to do about outsiders.

Several years ago, for instance, some residents were so upset by parked cars clogging the streets near campus that they revolted and formed their own parking district.

Yet, for a price, some neighbors illegally sell their passes to students, allowing them to park in the neighborhood without the risk of having to shell out $30 for a ticket.

“It’s disgusting,” said an elderly woman who has lived in the neighborhood for years. “The kids put letters in your mailbox soliciting the passes, and people sell. And then they want to complain about the congestion.”

As for the effort to reduce the “UCLA spillover,” officials of the neighborhood group say it plans to regroup and fight another day.

Sandy Brown, a group volunteer, said the closures might not have drawn such a chilly reception had opponents not mistakenly characterized it as a fait accompli.

“It was an alternative,” she said. “Those who say they like (the traffic situation) the way it is have their heads in the sand.”