Curb Appeal

The hills above Brentwood, where the Santa Monica Mountains finally shake off their cloak of ranch-style houses and are home instead to bobcats, hawks and deer, seem an unlikely place for a squabble over parking.

But residents near some trail heads in the Santa Monicas set off the dispute when they tried to ward off an influx of hikers, trail runners and mountain bikers.

The homeowners, complaining that the run-bike-hike set block driveways with their cars and add noise, congestion and trash, persuaded city officials to impose restricted parking on their streets.

That has infuriated many lovers of the outdoors, who must now park farther from the trail heads and walk or bike up a long, steep block before they can begin their recreation.

What angers them is not the extra sweat, they say; it’s the principle.

“At every one of these trails over the last 12 months, there’s been activity by the homeowners to keep the rest of us out,” said Glen Strauss, founder of a running club called the Santa Monica Mountaingoats, whose members meet at 7:30 a.m. on Saturdays to run in the hills. “That’s really lousy. And that’s what we’re fighting.”

On the parts of Bayliss and Queensferry roads next to a well-used recreational route known as Sullivan Canyon Trail, parking is now prohibited seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., except for one newly unrestricted 100-foot stretch on Queensferry.

On Westridge Road, there’s no parking on weekends from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. within several hundred feet of the trail head, which is at the top of a steep hill. That restriction went into effect in December.

In January, Strauss began circulating a petition asking the neighborhood’s City Council representative, Cindy Miscikowski, to rescind the no-parking designations. Although more than 300 trail users signed, Miscikowski’s office held firm.

“All they are really responsive to is this wealthy group of homeowners at the trail head,” said Strauss, a Santa Monica resident.

To get restricted parking, two-thirds of a block’s residents must sign a petition requesting it. The request must then be approved by the city Department of Transportation. In the case of Bayliss, Queensferry and Westridge, all the restrictions were approved while Miscikowski’s predecessor, Marvin Braude, was in office.

The no-parking zones were warranted, Miscikowski said, in light of residents’ charges that people were blocking access to the fire road, fire hydrants, and their driveways.

“I absolutely agree that they have a right to access public land,” Miscikowski said of the recreational users. “But we need to balance [the needs of different groups] so it’s not turning a residential street into a parking lot.”

Bernard Rochlin, a Westridge resident since 1970, said people have blocked his driveway many times, including one instance in which he called the police because he was unable to get a car out. “I would never deem it normal to park or protrude my car a foot or two into their driveway,” Rochlin said. “Happens all the time.”

Trail users’ missteps have been far worse than that, said Jon Gary, who lives on Queensferry and supports the daily 12-hour parking ban there.

“That’s a public toilet as far as a lot of people are concerned,” he said last week, pointing at the bushes behind his house.

Critics of the parking restrictions say they have never seen cars blocking driveways and think homeowners are exaggerating the occasional transgressions of a few users.

“As with any group of people, 99% behave and 1% does something stupid,” said cyclist Michael Roth, a Venice resident who is a longtime user of the Westridge trail. The problem is not so much unruly trail users, he said, as neighbors’ biases against outsiders.

“They don’t want us undesirables in their neighborhoods, [but] if you look at the person with the $1,500 bike, they’re not really undesirable,” said Roth, an insurance agent. “We’re not here to rob your house, we’re here to recreate.”

Fellow mountain cyclist Mark Langton of Thousands Oaks is more understanding of residents’ desire to preserve the tranquillity of their neighborhoods. “I don’t know if I can say these people are being unreasonable,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have a bunch of people parking in front of my house.”

Langton does what Miscikowski encourages more trail users to do: He enters the Westridge Trail from the San Fernando Valley side, where the trail head doesn’t abut a residential area and parking is easier to come by.

The well-traveled trail that stretches from the end of Westridge to the unpaved section of Mulholland Drive is on private land that abuts Topanga State Park. Miscikowski said the city is working with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to buy about 1,700 acres at the end of Westridge Road for public parkland, using $10 million in city and county bond funds approved by voters in 1996.

She hopes the purchase will be made by summer’s end, at which time she and the conservancy may begin investigating the possibility of building a parking lot about a quarter-mile up the Westridge fire road.

That’s not the perfect answer either, said Strauss. “There’s not a need to pave it all up and lose the valuable parkland for that,” he said, since there was plenty of street parking before the neighbors opted to restrict it.

As Mountaingoats member Kathy Kusner points out, the parking prohibition at the top of Westridge forces visitors to park downhill, in front of other residents’ homes. “We can walk another block or two, but it’s the beginning of a cycle of ‘push it back, push it back.’ ”

What Kusner and other critics of the parking ban fear most is that neighbors next to the no-parking zones will try to get restrictions on their blocks, too, shoving recreational users ever farther from the trails.

Warren Handler lives on Cordelia Road, which intersects Westridge several hundred feet from the trail head and has no restrictions on parking. Residents on his street, he said, have begun talking about petitioning for them.

But, he admitted, “It’s only moving the problem on down. I don’t know that there’s any answering this problem. . . . We just have to rely on people being good citizens.”

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Trail Dispute

Residents near some trail-heads in the Santa Monica Mountains above Brentwood have reacted to an influx of hikers and mountain bikers by successfully gaining restrictions on street parking.