The Road Less Traveled Is Council’s Goal : Transportation: The Mid-City Neighborhood Traffic Plan is designed to force commuters away from side streets and onto Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards.

Residents of a Santa Monica neighborhood are taking back their streets--not from crooks or thugs, but from commuters who whiz by their homes on the way to work.

The beleaguered 28-block residential neighborhood, known as Mid-City, is on the east end of town between Wilshire and Colorado boulevards, 26th Street and Centinela Avenue.

The area has borne the brunt of commuter traffic headed toward Colorado Place, the Water Garden and other office complexes, as well as from motorists traveling through a city that has a meager supply of north-south thoroughfares.

On Yale Street, for example, 4,500 cars zoom by each day. That’s 2 1/2 times the traffic that engineers view as acceptable for a side street.

For residents, all that traffic translates into a lot of aggravation. As 15-year-old Julie Shapiro told the Santa Monica City Council last week, her whole life is adversely affected by the glut of cars whizzing by.

“It’s hard to sleep, to Rollerblade . . . to walk . . . or get to the corner store,” Shapiro said.

Last week, the Santa Monica City Council approved an ambitious plan to dissuade motorists from using the side streets. The idea is to force cars onto streets meant to carry heavy traffic--Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards.

“We’re just trying to put the traffic back where it belongs,” said City Councilman Paul Rosenstein, who as a resident of Yale Street has been working on the traffic issue for a decade. (Neither Rosenstein nor Councilman Robert T. Holbrook participated in the council decision, however, because they own property in the area.)

Getting commuters to change their driving patterns will be accomplished through a series of fairly drastic measures--including closing off streets to through traffic and cutting four-lane roads to two lanes.

Many of the ideas fall into the category of “traffic calming,” the latest buzzwords in urban planning, which holds that the way to make cities more livable is to discourage traffic, rather than accommodate it with wider streets and the like.

The key components of the Mid-City Traffic Plan include:

* Blocking off Arizona Avenue to through traffic in both directions at Yale Street.

* Preventing westbound traffic on Arizona Avenue and Broadway from crossing 26th Street.

* Forcing eastbound traffic on Arizona Avenue and Broadway to turn right at Centinela.

* Narrowing 26th Street, Broadway and a portion of Colorado from four lanes to two.

* Placing “traffic circles” in the median of two intersections on Broadway and one on Arizona to slow down traffic. Cars will have to circle around them rather than taking a straight shot through the intersections.

In addition, some signals will be re-timed, and new stop signs and left-turn lanes will be added. If traffic on Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards gets out of hand, the second phase of the proposal would ban parking on those streets during rush hours.

Before the first phase of the traffic plan can go into effect, it must meet with the approval of the Planning Commission and a second vote of the City Council. So it will be several months before the barriers go up, according to city traffic engineer Ron Fuchiwaki. Even then, there will be a six-month test period to see if it goes as anticipated.

Mid-City residents, some of whom have worked on the plan for years, are strongly behind it and showed up force at the council hearing Tuesday night. The vote on the council was 5 to 0.

Holbrook is one person who opposes the plan, calling it “overkill.” He noted that the city, while notifying residents, did not notify property owners.

Holbrook, who does not live in the area himself, also predicted mayhem when the barriers go up. “It’s going to be a nightmare,” he said. “When those barricades go up, we’re going to hear from thousands of people.”

Residents will suffer because traffic alleviated on Yale Street will disperse to other side streets, Holbrook contends.

Former Santa Monica Mayor Christine Reed also predicts a major brouhaha when the plan becomes reality. In an interview, Reed recalled the reaction of motorists some years ago when a traffic barrier was set up on Washington Avenue. Some angry drivers threw eggs at her house. Another drove by nightly at 2 a.m. and leaned on his horn. And Reed had voted against putting up the barrier.