FOUNTAIN VALLEY

The Warner Avenue bridge over the San Diego Freeway got fresh stripes of paint this week to mark four new lanes, paving the way for a more efficient road system, traffic engineer Mark Lewis said. The 10-year, $3.3-million project began in 1989 when traffic began to bottleneck at the bridge. “It took six lanes of traffic, squeezed them into four over the bridge and then fed into six lanes on the other side,” Lewis said. Now the bridge has eight lanes--two new lanes for through traffic and two new lanes for exiting off the freeway, he said.

Before the bridge lanes doubled, traffic coming off the San Diego Freeway from both directions had to stop before merging with 50-mph traffic on Warner Avenue. The merging traffic created problems on Warner, including rear-end accidents, officials said. Fountain Valley contributed about $500,000 to the project, and Caltrans and the Orange County Transportation Authority funded the rest, City Manager Raymond Kromer said.