CHP Targets Speeders in Residential Area

California Highway Patrol officers say they will put the brakes on a group of unidentified teenage speeders who allegedly use one of Oak Park’s winding residential streets as a racetrack.

After hearing complaints from Bromely Drive residents at a “town hall meeting” Wednesday night, CHP Capt. Dave Kissinger said traffic enforcement will be stepped up in the area. The patrol enforces traffic laws on roadways and residential streets in Oak Park.

“These are high school kids,” Kissinger said. “We already know who one of them is, and we’re going to go out and see their parents.”

Kissinger said officers will deliver a letter to the home of the youth, who lives in the neighborhood north of Kanan Road and whose license plate number was taken down by irate residents.

“We have a policy here--if you saw a car speeding or doing something wrong and take down their license number and call our office. . . . Just on your say-so we send out a letter to the registered owner of the vehicle,” Kissinger said.

The letter will notify the youth’s parents of their child’s excessive speed and reckless driving. Kissinger said he hopes the letter and increased enforcement on the street, which connects at both ends with Lindero Canyon Road, will slow down the adolescents in sport utility vehicles careening around the street’s blind curves after school lets out.

However, residents are skeptical the highway patrol’s measures will work for long. They instead favor the installation of speed bumps or other permanent means of slowing down lead-footed drivers.

Erin Kutnick, who lives on Bromely Drive, said the speeding isn’t limited to adolescents getting out after school.

“It’s a chronic problem,” she said. “The highway patrol is sympathetic, but there’s not all that much they can do--they can’t be out here 24 hours per day.”