Gridlock Remedy for 101 Sought

A group of cities in northwestern Los Angeles County has secured $6 million to study ways to ease congestion on a 40-mile stretch of the Ventura and Hollywood freeways, officials said Tuesday.

The three-year study will seek to determine a solution to the route’s gridlock, enhance safety, improve air quality and find means of funding renovations, said Betty De Santis, president of the Las Virgenes/Malibu Council of Governments. The group is a unit of the Southern California Assn. of Governments and represents the cities of Malibu, Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Westlake Village.

“The absolute No. 1 priority for our region is traffic. If it doesn’t get better we’ll all be in big trouble,” De Santis said.

Elected officials and past studies by various government agencies have suggested potential improvements, including adding lanes or double-decking the freeway. But those proposals have met with legal restrictions or community objections.

About 320,000 vehicles daily use the portion of the Ventura Freeway-Hollywood Freeway between between California 23 in Thousand Oaks and the Harbor Freeway interchange in downtown Los Angeles, said Tom Choe, chief of the office of freeway operations for the California Department of Transportation.

When major accidents occur on the heavily traveled stretch, “drivers are in trouble, there’s no other close route to get downtown,” Choe added.

The freeway has four lanes in each direction for the most part, giving it far less capacity than, for instance, the Harbor Freeway, which has up to eight lanes in each direction. Yet about as many vehicles use the Ventura and Hollywood freeways as the Harbor Freeway, Choe said.

“It’s pretty much stop-and-go the whole way during rush hour,” he said of the Ventura and Hollywood freeways. “There’s a lot that needs to be done or the stop is going to get a lot longer.”

Although Caltrans constantly studies the freeway to search for solutions to gridlock, Choe welcomed other efforts.

“Every dime spent on that freeway is needed,” he said.

There are already programs to clear traffic from the Ventura Freeway portion, including the deployment of 14 California Highway Patrol officers who monitor the stretch between Lankershim and Van Nuys boulevards.