Balky Neighbors Can Cause Project Delays

When Robert Ades, a CPA and a homeowner in Brentwood, decided three years ago that his residential street needed speed humps, vehicles were zooming past at all hours of the day and night, and using the street to cut through from Sunset Boulevard into the upper reaches of Brentwood.

Ades says the two biggest roadblocks he anticipated were “management bureaucracy and massive lack of cooperation from my neighbors.” In the end, the bureaucracy was easier to manage than the neighbors were.

“The bureaucracy side was easy because the city has created a system to allow neighbors to have speed humps. If your street qualifies, you get your humps,” he says.

Gathering the required signatures from owners whose property fronted the street was a two-stage process.

“I finished the signature-gathering process on my block in about 10 hours over a two-month period. It was easy because I didn’t have far to walk. The city then rejected my street because it didn’t meet the engineering qualifications, but [I was told] if I added the next block, which is much longer, the two blocks taken together could meet the qualifications,” Ades recalls. “[Getting the signatures on] the second block was more difficult because there were twice as many houses [spread] over three times as much land. It took two to three weeks, and I worked on it almost every day.”

Ades ultimately tackled the task by soliciting the help of several neighbors at the far end of the second block and sending petitions through the mail with an explanatory letter and a postage-paid reply envelope.

“I received a lot of responses [through the mail], and in retrospect I wished I had done that from the start,” he says.

At that time, the city of Los Angeles expected property owners to pay for speed humps installed on their own streets, exclusive of a policy allowing two free per City Council district. Ades and his neighbors were able to avoid the tab because their street, which ranked at the top of a Westside priority list based on traffic and engineering studies, was chosen for free installation.

The installation almost came to a last-minute halt when one neighbor threatened to withdraw her signature upon being informed that a sign would be placed in front of her home. “One of the neighbors who had helped me get the petition signed became extremely upset when she was told a sign would be put in front of her house. The city said our whole program could be in jeopardy, and so she acquiesced,” Ades says.

The six speed humps and associated signs were installed nearly a year later, with the first hump roughly in front of Ades’ own home. He says cars and trucks driving over the hump are noisy, but he doesn’t mind.

“The increase in noise from the hump is far outweighed by the decrease in noise from the slower cars. It’s something I hardly ever notice,” he says.

Today, Ades is still pleased with the outcome of his speed humps project.

“If you are persistent and you really work hard at it--and you have to work hard at it--you can get it through,” he says. “[The speed humps] made a real difference in the neighborhood and it was well worth the effort.”