Road-Work Warnings on Edinger: Their Job Is Done

Dear Street Smart:

For well over the past five months on Edinger Avenue from Magnolia Street to Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach, orange construction signs have been posted on the right side of the street indicating that construction is ahead and the left lane is closed.

There has been absolutely no construction activity going on in all that time, and there doesn’t seem to be any coming up (no machines or pavement markings are in sight).

This is especially irritating for the westbound lane because Edinger rises to go over the San Diego Freeway and drivers cannot see whether construction has started. Most of us have ignored the signs, and this can create unsafe conditions and a major tie-up if and when construction begins. I have hesitated to write, thinking that construction would start any day now. Why have the signs been around so long with no activity?

Mary Elizabeth Mount Fountain Valley By the time you read this, the signs should be gone, according to Jim Otterson, Huntington Beach traffic engineer. Because of your letter, he looked into the matter and discovered that the signs had been left there inadvertently by a private contractor after a Beach Boulevard improvement project that ended in January. “It was an oversight,” Otterson said. “Mistakes happen. We’ll take the signs down.”

Dear Street Smart:

Caltrans did extensive work on Coast Highway through Newport Beach a couple of years ago, but it appears that they forgot a section needing lane dividers and Botts dots.

Westbound from Pelican Wall to 2300 E. Coast Highway, a section of the road really needs the dividers, as drivers wander from side to side not knowing which side they should stay close to. Some just take the middle and really confuse other drivers.

Also on Coast Highway west of Jamboree Road, the solid white line has worn off. There are already two lanes merging--then the Jamboree traffic going west on Coast Highway starts moving to the left, so we have three lanes merging into two. A solid concrete barrier would really help matters more than just painting the white line again.

Robert B. Belknap Newport Beach An inspection by Caltrans engineers alerted by your letter confirmed the need for lane clarification near Pelican Wall (a decorated retaining wall between Newport Boulevard and Dover Drive) where the shoulder of the road widens for a short distance before tapering off to allow two lanes and on-street parking, spokeswoman Rose Orem said. The inspection also confirmed the worn-out striping west of Jamboree.

Both problems will be rectified by January, Orem said.

But Caltrans doesn’t agree that a concrete barrier would be better than a white line west of Jamboree, she said. A barrier “would compromise the safety of motorists by introducing a fixed object on the roadway.”

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Dear Street Smart:

It appears to me that the people building the express tollway lanes on the Riverside Freeway have also managed to confiscate, for their own profit-making purposes, the free public car-pool lanes on the northernmost several miles of the Costa Mesa Freeway. Am I correct in my assessment of the situation? If so, by what authority have they acted? Was the matter subject to formal public hearings?

Richard E. Gandin Laguna Beach None of the freeway has been confiscated, a spokesman for the builder said.

“He seems to have some concern that we sneaked out there and tried to snag some freeway,” Greg Brooks of the California Private Transportation Co. said of your letter. “That’s not the case.”

Just less than two miles of car-pool lane at the northernmost end of the Costa Mesa Freeway has been closed temporarily to accommodate the final stages of construction on the toll road, including the installation of overhead signs and loop detectors embedded in the pavement to measure freeway speed, Brooks said. The lanes were closed in late September and are expected to reopen in the next two or three weeks. They will not be part of the toll road.