Proceed With Caution

There were ups. There were downs. There were sudden stops. There were surprise curves and detours.

And that was just the political process by which Thousand Oaks’ controversial Borchard Road extension came to be.

With the opening of Ventura County’s most talked-about road to traffic last week, we will soon learn whether the fears of its opponents are well-founded or not. Either way, it stands as a monument to compromise.

The road was approved by the Thousand Oaks City Council despite being more than twice as steep in places as city codes allow. Those standards limit road steepness to a grade of 5%. The Ventura Freeway’s hair-raising Conejo Grade is a somewhat steeper 7%. Yet in 1996 the City Council approved a half-mile extension of Borchard Road that would in places climb at 12%.

Allowing that exception to the rules reduced visual scarring of the hillsides and also saved the developer the expense of moving 3.5 million cubic yards of dirt, estimated at $1 million to $4 million. But after the route was graded and its steepness became obvious, area residents asked the council to reconsider.

Amid dueling lawsuits between developers and the city, work continued. To limit the hazard, the city approved half a million dollars worth of safety improvements. One is a traffic light at the bottom of the hill that turns red if an automatic sensor detects a car approaching in excess of the 45 mph speed limit. In addition, a center divider separates uphill and downhill traffic and a lighted crosswalk system gives pedestrians a better chance of crossing safely.

We believe the safety measures will do much to reduce the road’s potential riskiness. It is indeed quite steep in places; drivers and pedestrians alike will need to use care. But the massive grading required to make roads straight and relatively level is not always the best solution in mountainous Southern California.

Like city traffic engineers and police officers, we will be watching the road’s safety performance closely. We urge the drivers who use it to proceed with caution.