Many Driven to Distraction in Camarillo

Mike Hall compares driving around this town to scurrying like a rat through a high-walled maze.

“The pizza guys around here must have total nightmares,” he said.

Typewriter store owner Leonard Shields said the road design around City Hall is so confusing that he has to break the law to get there. “If you don’t know your way, you can’t get in there legally,” Shields said.

For mechanic Gil Ruby, ongoing efforts by city planners to fix traffic woes translate to lost business. “Look at all these [construction] cones,” he said grumbling. “No one can get in or out of the gas station.”

These are typical traffic complaints levied by residents and workers in Camarillo, a quiet slice of suburbia where incumbent officials rarely meet a development they fail to embrace.

“Traffic around here has got to be the ultimate in bad planning,” said Hall, a logistics engineer from Camarillo who works at the Point Mugu Navy base. “It’s worse than anywhere else around here.”

In his 11 years living off Carmen Drive, Hall said he never has gotten used to the road patterns.

“I’m from the Midwest,” he said, “and the first time I came to Camarillo I kept getting lost because all the streets look the same: wide, with big medians and block walls on both sides.

“It’s a maze,” Hall said. “This whole city is one big maze.”

Incorporated in 1964, Camarillo is a collection of almost 20 square miles of farmland, housing, shopping centers and light industry.

Its 12,500 acres are divided by the Ventura Freeway, which roughly separates the older and newer sections of town. Just six freeway interchanges serve the 60,000 residents--not nearly enough to satisfy the city’s drivers.

To many of the residents’ dismay, traffic congestion in this cookie-cutter bedroom community is a mess.

“I’ve given up,” said Doug Brown, who owns The Clubhouse sports bar off Arneill Road.

“What they ought to do is slow down all this development,” he said. “This is a nice place to live, but pretty soon it’s going to look like Orange County.”

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City officials defend the planning and zoning decisions they have made over the past three decades.

When they look at Camarillo maps or the city’s General Plan, they see logic and organization--wide streets and sidewalks, plenty of landscaping and parking, and well-timed signals that keep drivers humming along.

“We certainly hold our own, but I also think we’re in with a very good group,” said Tom Fox, who has supervised traffic management in Camarillo for the past five years.

“As a whole, the cities in Ventura County are doing very well,” Fox said. “When you compare the traffic environment here to our neighbors to the south, we have a much better traveling environment.”

The city has built wide, sweeping arterial streets where U-turns are prohibited. Thick center medians divide most of the busiest roads and, worst of all, some residents say, the roads are lined with tall, slightly disorienting sound walls that block many of the city’s newer neighborhoods from sight.

Critics say the City Council has continued to approve developments--be they commercial, residential or industrial--without paying close enough attention to what impacts they may have on traffic circulation.

New shopping and retail complexes seemingly sprout up every few months, they say. More are on the way, such as the super-sized Target store opening soon on what used to be prime farmland.

“There’s so much traffic on Dawson Drive already, but they keep putting in more industry there,” laments Mike Doyle, a flooring contractor who has lived in a housing tract off Dawson Drive since 1969.

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“I don’t know where the council members are living, but it sure isn’t in my neighborhood,” he said.

Mayor David M. Smith said the neighborhood around the industrial Dawson Drive section of town is one of the community’s oldest tracts.

“What went in there went in more than eight years ago,” Smith said. “That wouldn’t happen today.”

Nonetheless, Smith does concede that roads and other city services may not have kept pace with recent developments.

The complaints “don’t surprise me at all,” he said. “We’ve gone through a significant amount of growth. While we’re making improvements, it’s very disconcerting.”

But access to City Hall is beyond improvement, some residents complain.

Shields, who owns the White Typewriter Co. on Ventura Boulevard, said the first time he made his way to City Hall, he didn’t see the small green sign or the white arrow pointing him left on Paseo Camarillo.

At the corner of Carmen and Ponderosa, a stone’s throw from the thick front doors, Shields realized his mistake. So he turned left, west on Ponderosa, planning to turn in to City Hall.

But to his dismay, a center median forced him down to Lantana Street, where he made an illegal U-turn, headed east on Ponderosa, turned south onto Carmen Drive and then west into the narrow City Hall parking lot.

“You’d think they could have come up with a better plan,” Shields said.

The uncertain journey to City Hall epitomizes much that is wrong with the traffic flow and urban planning in Camarillo, Shields said.

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But Fox, the city’s traffic engineer, said the restrictive access to City Hall is intentionally designed to promote safety.

“We treat the driveways into City Hall the same way we treat driveways into any land use along an arterial street,” he said. “By restricting movement, we allow more safe mobility around town.”

They may be safe, but traveling the roads from Point A to Point B in this town is rarely so simple as a straight line.

It takes 12 minutes to navigate the 4.4 miles between the pricey Las Posas Hills estates and the Camarillo Library, an average driving speed of 22 mph.

To take in a movie after conquering 18 holes at Spanish Hills, plan on nine minutes to cover the two miles of pavement between the exclusive resort and the Edwards Theatres. That translates to less than 14 mph.

It takes sheriff’s deputies 11 minutes to maneuver the 2.5 miles of asphalt between the Camarillo police station and City Hall--a driving speed of barely 15 mph, if they are careful to obey posted speed limits.

It takes Shields six minutes to drive the mile between his typewriter store and City Hall, a 10-mph average speed even with the shortcuts.

“I don’t see how they can ever improve it,” he said glumly.

These commute times in Camarillo during a typical spring weekday underscore what some residents and urban planners say is a much deeper problem endemic to many suburban communities: the slow erosion of a sense of place.

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But City Engineer Daniel Greeley defended the road patterns, saying that commute times, like traffic counts, vary greatly depending on road conditions, volume and timing.

“Maybe you hit all the signals,” Greeley said. “Maybe the next time you drive it, all the signals are green.”

To some experts, Camarillo represents the worst of regional planning: wide, sweeping streets sliced in half by leafy medians and buttressed by concrete-block walls.

Arterial streets like Ponderosa Drive and Las Posas Road discourage walking, window-shopping and other staples of the American village, according to proponents of the neo-traditional school of planning and development.

Sprawling housing tracts like the Lakeside Village across from City Hall discourage any sense of community by mandating that residents drive everywhere, some planners say.

“A street isn’t just for moving cars,” said urban planner Peter Calthorpe, a national planning expert who manages his own firm in Oakland. “It’s for pedestrians, it’s for bikers. It’s the social structure of a neighborhood.”

In places like Camarillo, local planners “are doing everything wrong,” Calthorpe said. “The sprawling East Bay is similar to Camarillo. Rather than strip centers, there should be main streets for shopping.”

Five years ago, Calthorpe proposed a project for Camarillo incorporating the neo-traditional concepts for neighborhoods that encourage residents to walk.

But residents were so concerned about the loss of farmland that the developer scrapped his project. Nonetheless, Calthorpe said the concept of clustering services and activities within walkable distance should be standard urban planning.

“Our idea is to think of the city as a series of mixed-use neighborhoods, rather than a map of different land use zones,” Calthorpe said. “Each neighborhood collects its own destinations--parks, schools, shopping.”

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That would suit John Wooton just fine. These days, the financially strapped Oxnard College student has to walk or take buses anywhere he goes.

“Camarillo’s not very pedestrian-friendly,” he said, waiting for a bus the other day across from City Hall. “[Motorists] drive too fast and they don’t have enough crosswalks.”

But Greeley said his office designs practical, efficient streets for the overwhelming majority of residents who refuse to give up their wheels.

“People still aren’t ready to give up their cars,” he said. “They don’t have to. They’re willing to take the time it takes to drive wherever they want to go.”

Judging by recent development projects, traffic could get even worse. City Council has approved several major projects that have added to the burden of traffic on city streets.

For example, when the Edwards Theatres multiplex opened last spring on a stretch of Ventura Boulevard previously reserved for farmland, thousands of extra cars poured into the sprawling movie house.

Carmen Drive has never been the same. Contractors now work feverishly to catch up by widening the bridge across the Ventura Freeway.

A new four-lane overpass opened earlier this month, but much work remains.

Meanwhile, southbound traffic exiting the freeway backs up into the right lane because a three-way stop at the end of the exit slows drivers down.

Next door, the Camarillo Factory Stores opened a few months after the Edwards cinema, inviting even more cars to the crowded roadway.

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A nearby section of Ventura Boulevard is scheduled to be realigned and widened during the 1996-97 fiscal year, just in time for the opening of the Camarillo Town Center, another huge retail complex now under construction.

Fox said the spate of new projects has not overwhelmed city streets.

“We’ve had the ability to work with developers and collect fees that enable us to keep up with development,” he said. “We’re providing the capacity to serve the city.

“Some of the other cities with older areas have a much greater challenge,” he said.

Terri Cameron, the general manager of the Camarillo Factory Stores complex, which operates more than 60 stores now and is planning for a third phase next year, agrees with Fox.

She said transportation officials have done well to keep up with demands on city streets.

“The Las Posas interchange works very well,” she said. “And the city just put a four-way stop sign out by the main entrance in front of Ann Taylor, so that helps people get in and out easier.”

Still, Cameron concedes that the Carmen Drive interchange is a mess right now.

But when the widening is completed, it too will accommodate traffic needs, she said.

“You don’t need a bigger and better interchange until there’s something to get to,” she said. “I think they kind of go hand in hand.”

In addition to the Carmen Drive project, Camarillo traffic planners have identified dozens of other road improvements in their five-year capital projects plan.

All told, they have cataloged more than 40 projects that will cost more than $55 million over the next five years.

The priciest improvements include a freeway interchange at Flynn Road in the next two years ($8 million); a new interchange between Las Posas Road and Central Avenue sometime after 2000 ($9 million); and the extension of Adolfo Road across Conejo Creek in 1999 ($3 million).

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Planners design and prioritize the road projects in response to need, said Greeley, the city engineer.

“Our goal is to provide the infrastructure so the people of Camarillo are served with adequate circulation,” he said. “So they can get from one place to another.”

But Ruby, the auto mechanic who saw business drop drastically during the months-long construction of the Carmen Bridge overpass, hopes those other plans do not take so long.

“These guys are on commission,” he said last week, motioning to his idle crew. “They’re not making any money.”