It’s Slow Going on the 101
There was a time when Lisa Percival could leave for work in Ventura whenever she wanted to, without worrying about traffic.
Now, if she wants to avoid stop-and-go freeway conditions, she has to pull her red Ferrari out of her Camarillo driveway before 7 a.m. “If I leave at 7:30 or quarter to 8, there’s an accident every single morning--at least one,” said the county’s deputy chief tax collector.
Call it the Angelization of Ventura County’s roadways. Over the past decade, the traffic headaches that have made L.A. the long-running capital of gridlock have oozed north. The number of cars and trucks traveling the 44-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties has increased 35% at bottlenecks that Percival and thousands like her confront every day on their way to and from work.
That increase is more than twice the rate of the county’s overall rise in population. It reflects several growth and economic trends, said Chris Stephens, deputy director for the Ventura County Transportation Commission.
One is that some parts of the county, particularly Oxnard and Camarillo, are growing faster than others, according to figures from the county’s Planning Department. Another trend is the significant growth of retail businesses along the Ventura Freeway corridor, such as the popular Camarillo outlets, which are drawing more local and out-of-county patrons on weekdays as well as weekends, said Bill Watkins, executive director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project.
A third and increasingly vital factor is a strong local job market, enabling more residents to find work inside the county than a decade ago.
“It’s not strictly due to the booming economy,” Stephens said. “It’s the nature of development as well. Ventura County is evolving to the point that it’s no longer a bedroom community for Los Angeles. It’s developing its own jobs and economy.”
County planners and economists said that they don’t have exact data on how many new jobs have been created in each city over the past decade, but they said that growth in new job creation appears greater proportionally west of the Conejo Grade.
If the job market remains strong within the county, it could stem the growth of commuter traffic through eastern Ventura County into Los Angeles County, but may add to congestion west of Thousand Oaks, Stephens said.
A fourth, less significant factor may be the increase throughout Southern California in the number of cars per household, which often translates to more drivers from one household being on the road at any given time.
“That trend has been going on for years,” Stephens said. Just what that increase has been over the decade, planners won’t know until the 2000 census is released.
Thousand Oaks Has 101’s Busiest Stretch
The census, taken once every 10 years, is a key document for traffic planners, who draw from it important demographic and employment information that is used in various travel studies.
“A big part of our traffic forecasting is based upon information like number of vehicles per household, income per household and journey to work information, and all that information comes from the census,” Stephens said. “It’s crucial information for developing our forecast.”
The most-traveled stretch of the Ventura Freeway in the county today is in Thousand Oaks, between California 23 and Hampshire Road. It’s crowded because of the number of cars that feed onto the 101 from California 23, residents of Simi Valley and the smaller city of Moorpark, whose population grew by nearly one-third over the past decade.
In 1998, the most recent year for which data are available from the California Department of Transportation, 189,000 cars traveled that spot daily in both directions--up 22.7% from 1988. During peak travel time, 15,800 cars traveled that section in an hour--up 15.3% from a decade before. This tends to be the most congested area during the morning rush hour, 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.
Transportation officials already have set funding aside to widen California 23 and are studying whether expanding the interchange at the Ventura Freeway would ease congestion as well.
In western Ventura County, the most traveled strip of the 101 is in Oxnard, at the Santa Clara River bridge, which falls between the California 1 junction and Johnson Drive. In 1998, 155,000 cars crossed the bridge each day--up 34.8% from a decade before. During peak travel time, 13,200 cars used that patch, up 33.3% from a decade earlier.
The average evening rush hour, recorded by Caltrans as 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., is particularly congested in this area, and often traffic backs up several miles. Just south of the bridge, the freeway narrows from three lanes to two, creating a bottleneck. Adding to the problem is merging traffic from California 1.
There is some relief in sight in Oxnard. The Santa Clara River bridge, now three lanes in each direction, is slated to be torn down and replaced with a 12-lane bridge. In the process, an extra lane will be added to alleviate congestion at the Ventura Road exit, and the awkward left-lane merger of California 1 will be replaced with a traditional right-lane onramp.
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But as is so often the case, traffic will almost certainly get worse before it gets better. The $80-million bridge project is slated to begin in 2002, with completion set in 2006.
For those four years, traffic could get dicey, said Stephens. “It’s going to get bad. I believe people will find alternate routes.”
As ugly as it could be, the bridge expansion is crucial, say planners who have completed commuter forecasts through 2020.
Another area of growing traffic congestion is Camarillo, where the past decade’s retail and housing boom is apparent. In 1998, 140,000 vehicles traversed the freeway daily between Central Avenue and Las Posas Road, the exit for the outlet malls. That figure is up 28.4% from a decade earlier.
“This time of the morning, it used to take me 15 minutes to get from Camarillo to here,” said Gary Weed, 28, who stopped at a Thousand Oaks gas station about 8:15 a.m. on a recent weekday. “Now it takes me maybe 25 minutes to half an hour.”
Weed, who drives a Roadrunner van shuttling Ventura County residents to Los Angeles International Airport, said he takes Pacific Coast Highway to the airport whenever possible, to avoid the Ventura Freeway.
“It’s not just Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley anymore,” Weed said of the traffic. “It’s more people coming to this area, because they think it’s less crowded. That makes it more crowded.”
If there is a silver lining, it’s that the increased traffic along the Ventura Freeway does not appear to have led to increased injuries and deaths.
As traffic increased, so did the number of crashes throughout the past decade--from an average of 1,015 a year during 1989 through 1993, to an average of 1,210 annually in 1994 through 1998.
Despite Woes, It’s Still Worse in L.A.
Fatalities dropped from an average of 10 per year during 1989 through 1993, to nine per year in the next five years. And the number of injuries decreased from an average of 634 per year during the first period, to an average of 587 per year in recent years.
Even with growth-control measures in place, Ventura County is expected to accommodate many more residents, and drivers, over the next two decades.
By 2020, planners estimate, the most crowded strip of the Ventura Freeway in Thousand Oaks, at California 23, will be carrying 207,000 cars a day--a 9.5% increase from 1998.
And the stretch of the Ventura Freeway at the Santa Clara River bridge will be nearly as crowded, with an estimated daily load of 201,000 vehicles--nearly a 30% increase from 1998.
None of these statistics, however, reflects how good Ventura County residents have it compared with Los Angeles drivers. For example, the stretch of the Ventura Freeway at the San Diego Freeway juncture in Los Angeles carries an average of 330,000 vehicles per day, or 22,400 vehicles at its peak hour--59% more than will travel the 101 through Thousand Oaks 20 years from now.
Rush hour aside, nor do the statistics reflect how relatively little traffic travels Ventura County’s portion of the Ventura Freeway throughout much of the day.
“It’s gotten worse,” commuter Percival said of the local traffic. “But at least you can find a time of day it’s not bad.”
