Traffic Planners Signal Better Days Ahead at Busy Corner

Dear Street Smart:

I am wondering why there is still a blinking red signal at the intersection of Central and Santa Clara avenues between Oxnard and Camarillo.

This signal has been there since the 1960s, which was fine for the amount of traffic back then.

But now in the morning you are behind 20 cars at the intersection and also late in the afternoon.

How about putting in a regular signal soon?

David Best

Ventura

Dear Reader:

Guess what? Your taxpayer dollars are already at work, at least as far as that intersection goes.

Traffic planners in Ventura County have designed improvements at the corner of Central and Santa Clara avenues to ease congestion.

“We have a project in the final phase of design for a traffic signal and some left-turn lanes there,” said Butch Britt, the county transportation chief.

“We plan to be out on construction this fall, as soon as we get all of the final clearances and the design and construction authorization,” he said.

The $225,000 construction will probably begin in November, and take three to four months to complete, Britt said.

Dear Street Smart:

Upland Road is heavily traveled in east Camarillo.

The problem is that it narrows from four lanes to only two between Hillridge and San Onofre drives.

Each of the intersections at Woodcreek and Upland roads and Mission Oaks Boulevard and Upland have been the site of at least five accidents in the last seven months due to cars turning off or onto busy Upland Road.

When will the city of Camarillo complete Upland to make it a four-lane road between Hillridge and San Onofre drives?

Mary Rose

Camarillo

Dear Reader:

Camarillo traffic officials have short- and long-term plans for Upland Road, which continues to see more and more cars as time goes by.

“In the short term, we’ll be moving forward with a signal at Woodcreek and Upland,” city traffic engineer Tom Fox said. “We studied putting one at Mission Oaks and Upland instead, but there was not as much traffic there.”

That traffic light will go up by early next year.

Long-range plans, those to be done within five years, call for widening Upland Road to four lanes. But that project probably will not begin until the turn of the century, Fox said.

Dear Street Smart:

Approaching the Ventura Freeway on Borchard Road in Newbury Park, one finds three lanes at the intersection of Borchard and Michael Drive. One lane is left turn only, the middle lane is straight ahead and the last lane is for going straight or turning right.

Early in its history, this last lane was right turn only. I would like to see a return to that designation.

When I approach this intersection--most often planning to turn right--I find a long line of cars in this right lane, and I have never seen more than three cars in the center lane.

When the first car in line is stopped at the light, the right-turners have to wait--unnecessarily, I believe.

The center-lane cars, if they are turning right onto the freeway, have plenty of time to move into the right lane after passing through Michael, as the great majority of the right-lane cars are turning right at Michael.

A return to the previous striping, with the right lane designated for right turns only, would help a lot.

Frank A. Johnson

Newbury Park

Dear Reader:

Leave it to the engineers to say what works best.

Thousand Oaks traffic planners experimented with the right-turn-only designation for that lane during the yearlong Borchard Road freeway overpass construction that recently ended.

Unfortunately, the experiment failed, city traffic engineer Jeff Knowles said.

“The problem we experienced was that there was very heavy movement of traffic from the center lane,” he said. “They all had to quickly merge to the right to get the southbound onramp.

“The spacing of Michael and the freeway onramp are so close that it caused problems,” he said. “We hoped that it would be an improvement, but it didn’t work the way we wanted.

“If everybody had turned right [at Michael Drive], it probably would have worked quite well, but not everybody did.”

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