When Freeway Fears Collide With Desire for a Quiet Street

For decades, South Pasadena’s residents have successfully fought tooth and nail, in statehouse and White House, to keep their Norman Rockwell painting of a city free of a proposed freeway.

On one oak-lined block of Fletcher Avenue, however, the war over traffic in South Pasadena comes down to something simpler: speed humps.

Homeowners there complain that their street lined with ample front porches seems like a freeway during rush hours when commuters use what is one of the few roads cutting across Huntington Drive as a shortcut to and from Los Angeles.

And some residents say they sense a reluctance among city officials to slow the flow of traffic on such north-south streets that parallel the proposed Long Beach Freeway extension for fear of fueling support among motorists for its construction.

That freeway would slice through South Pasadena, Pasadena and El Sereno, forcing the removal of 900 homes and 6,000 trees. To hear some in South Pasadena tell it, the life of their small town would be threatened if the 6.2-mile, $1.4-billion extension is built. The city has sued in federal court to block the freeway’s construction.

Nestled in the heart of the historic Marengo neighborhood, Fletcher Avenue between Oak Street and Huntington Drive is just the kind of district that gives the city of 24,000 a reputation as a homeowner’s heaven. Craftsman-style houses and other early 20th century homes line the block. Parents and children stroll to church, school and the local coffee shop.

Fletcher Avenue homeowner Camille Favilli is worried about the commuters who, she says, speed down the street.

“We’ve far too many kids, pets and seniors on this street for cars to drive so fast,” said Favilli, the Neighborhood Watch block co-captain. “Families move here for safety and the livability of small-town America.”

So Favilli and her neighbors early last year settled upon speed humps as the solution, proposing their installation for the first time anywhere in South Pasadena. Homeowners weren’t interested in diverting traffic from their stretch of Fletcher; they just want to slow it down, she said.

Favilli and her neighbors figured their City Hall, famous for its anti-automobile rhetoric in opposing the freeway extension, would surely accede to their request.

With words of encouragement from city public works officials, they diligently circulated a petition required to comply with a stringent city policy on speed humps. They soon got 91% of the block residents’ approval for three 12-foot-wide, 2 5/8-inches-high humps.

A city survey confirmed that a total of about 800 cars travel the avenue daily at an average speed of 35 mph to 38 mph, with some more than doubling the 25 mph speed limit.

The police and fire departments did not fight the proposed speed bumps, unlike safety officials in some communities around the state who have complained that humps slow emergency vehicles. And South Pasadena’s advisory Transportation Committee gave thumbs up in October.

“Naively, we thought this is going to go through,” Favilli said. “We’d jumped through all the hoops.”

But residents say they then learned that getting government to deliver is far from simple, even in their cozy town.

In November, Public Works Director James R. Van Winkle confessed he made a mistake when he initially encouraged the hump idea.

He said he subsequently learned that the city in 1998 had changed that part of Fletcher from a local street to a collector street in the city’s General Plan without telling residents. City policy does not allow speed bumps on collector streets, a term usually reserved for streets with thousands of cars daily.

“I was using an old plan,” Van Winkle said.

Had months of work come to naught? The rules are the rules, said officials, in a city founded 112 years ago on the principle of providing “a church or school on every hill, but no saloon in the valley.”

“The process for getting these things is just as bad as the problem,” said Mark Messana, a Fletcher Avenue father of two. “The city administration ignores the residents the same way the cars ignore the speed limit.”

The Fletcher folks grew angry and shot off a letter to the City Council, questioning why the policy simply couldn’t be changed. What’s more, they suggested the council cared only about keeping the freeway extension from encroaching into the 3.4-square-mile community wedged between Los Angeles and Pasadena.

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City officials deny there is a connection between their opposition to speed humps and the freeway fight. But Councilman Harry Knapp said, “The more streets dedicated to north-south traffic, the less need for the freeway.”

When Fletcher homeowners took the issue to the council last month, they got little Christmas cheer. A few residents from adjacent streets warned that humps on Fletcher would just move traffic to their own streets.

No other council member supported Councilman David Rose’s motion to permit the speed bumps. Instead, the council agreed to reexamine the issue later this year after a traffic consultant looks at alternatives.

“I’m generally against speed humps because I feel they just divert traffic to other streets,” Councilman Knapp said. “We’re trying the enforcement route first. . . . Once you put humps in they are as hard as heck to get out.”

Police armed with radar, meanwhile, have started to crack down on speeders, and the city recently installed a speed limit sign and one saying “slow.”

South Pasadena Police Chief Michael Berkow said his department has ticketed 64 drivers for speeding on the block since the first week of December, and he insisted that traffic is slowing down.

“We’re out there virtually every day,” Berkow said. “In the last few months we’ve seen far fewer speeders.”

But avenue residents say those efforts amount to a finger-in-the-dike approach.

“We aren’t going to have cops here 24 hours a day for the next 30 years,” Favilli said. “We just want our humps.”

Councilman Rose said he fears the city may be endangering lives by not putting in the humps. “I’ve been out and seen the speed,” he said. “Parents take up what I call the Fletcher stance. They stand with their backs to the street on the sidewalk so they can watch their kids like those British guards.”

The only good result of the squabble, neighbors say, is that they are now a closer-knit community than ever.

“It’s like the Cold War,” said attorney Glenn Rothner, a 10-year Fletcher homeowner. “It has brought us all together.”