Residents Fight a Flood of Commuters

The narrow roads winding past the hedge-lined estates of the Encino hills seem an unlikely setting for an urban traffic hell.

But just wait until rush hour.

That’s when commuters from the San Fernando Valley’s flatlands flood into the hills, anxious for a faster way across the Santa Monica Mountains.

They come with engines roaring, brakes screeching and horns blaring. Some gesture rudely at residents struggling to get out of their own driveways. And on occasion, a four-wheeled invader will vault a curb.

“They’re nasty, nasty people,” said Margery Grossman, pointing to where out-of-control cars had plowed into her daughter’s Saab and two brick walls in front of her home on Ballina Canyon Road. “They don’t think of the fact that people live here.”

With average commute times getting longer, many Southland neighborhoods have seen their peace and quiet shattered by shortcut-seeking motorists.

Each weekday, more than 120,000 commuters use residential streets to traverse the Santa Monica Mountains between the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles. In the last 25 years, such traffic has grown about 40%, said Yadi Hashemi, transportation engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

One area suffering the brunt of this is this 4.5-square-mile swath of the Encino hills. The problem is so bad that the city is holding a vote-by-mail referendum on possible solutions. But the referendum is also fueling an uproar among the many drivers and nearby residents who don’t live in the hills. They call attempts to restrict traffic elitist.

“Is it because some of these homes are more valuable than others that they can prevent people from using public streets?” asked Carol Glushon, who lives in a more modest Encino neighborhood north of Ventura Boulevard. “The residents there don’t own the streets.”

The Transportation Department has mailed ballots to 4,800 households in the Encino hills. Residents have until May 3 to cast their votes.

The changes would attempt to restrict the number of cars heading south into the hills along three miles of Ventura Boulevard. Residents will be asked whether the city should make traffic lights stay red longer, install no-turn signs and add a left-turn light at a San Diego Freeway onramp.

The department requires two-thirds approval by at least 40% of the surrounding households. The balloting is somewhat informal; it is not regulated by city election laws.

It is the city’s third and by far largest traffic referendum, also believed to be the biggest in the country. From Portland, Ore., to Dayton, Ohio, such neighborhood polls are becoming a popular means of gauging support for “traffic calming” measures such as speed bumps, roundabouts and street closures.

“You want to make sure [residents] are happy with the change,” said Reid Ewing, author of the 1999 Federal Highway Administration book “Traffic Calming: State of the Practice.”

In the 1950s, transit planners saw the need for more freeways through the Santa Monicas, including a Reseda Freeway just west of the Encino hills. It was among the many that were envisioned for the Los Angeles region but later abandoned because of neighborhood opposition, among other reasons.

As a result, traffic continued to pour into the residential streets of the hills. Now, an estimated 70% of the cars on Encino hills roads are cut-through traffic, according to the Transportation Department.

“This neighborhood has become a freeway alternative,” said Pauline Chan, a senior transportation engineer for the city.

Artie Harris, a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, pointed to his flower bed, which has twice been smashed by cars that skidded over the sidewalk. Up and down Calneva Drive, trees have been toppled and utility poles rammed.

“Motorcycle guy couldn’t negotiate curve and ended up in the bushes, right there,” said Harris, motioning across the street from his home of 31 years. “A car rolled a few times over there,” he continued, directing a finger farther downthe street.

Then there was the Corvette that plowed into his brother’s parked sedan. The driver came “this close” to getting decapitated, said Harris, holding his hands inches apart.

As he spoke, a neighbor’s electric gate slid open and a black Lexus nosed out, causing a sport utility vehicle speeding up the hill to screech to a halt.

“Did you see that?” Harris shouted. “She just missed getting hit! There are near misses constantly.”

Some mountain-crossing primary roads, such as Sepulveda, Laurel Canyon and Beverly Glen boulevards, are expected to shoulder heavy traffic. These so-called secondary highways are relatively straight and wide. Many of their homes sit far apart, behind dense foliage, and have driveways that feed onto side roads.

Most roads in the Encino hills are more like capillaries. They were never intended to carry big traffic loads. The streets swoop this way and that, with blind curves and steep climbs.

A few months ago, a car speeding down Calneva careered onto Shahriar Rad’s estate. It crunched the base of a Greek statue, demolished some brickwork and knocked over a pair of mature palm trees.

“It’s a madhouse,” said Rad, a chiropractor, as he gazed ruefully at two replacement saplings he planted in front of his home.

He and his wife, Atoosa, want to move. Their 1 1/2-year-old daughter, Shilyn, is having trouble sleeping because of honking horns and gunning motors, said Atoosa Rad, cradling the saucer-eyed toddler.

As traffic-calming measures go, the city’s proposals for the hills are moderate, with a goal of reducing traffic by 15%, said Chan, of the Transportation Department.

In the early ‘90s, the city considered more radical solutions for the hills--such as barricading streets. But those ideas were nixed when residents realized how inconvenient they could be.

Other fixes the city tried had unintended effects.

At a T-intersection across from Rad’s house, the city installed stop signs about a year ago to slow the traffic on Calneva. But the signs caused mile-long backups, fueled minor incidents of road rage and did nothing to stop some cars. The signs were eventually removed.

Now, the Transportation Department is pursuing changes one small step at a time. It plans to start by tweaking four traffic signals so there is less green time for cars trying to cross Ventura Boulevard to enter the hills.

If that fails to divert enough traffic, the city will adjust more lights. A last resort would be signs prohibiting rush-hour turns into the hills.

The proposals make drivers shudder.

“I think I would tear my hair out,” said Debbie Plotkin, a Woodland Hills mother.

Plotkin motors through the hills to take her son, Adam, to his private school on Mulholland Drive. If she was forced to take the Ventura and San Diego freeways, two of California’s most congested, her half-hour drive could stretch to an hour, she said.

Shortly before 8 a.m. on a recent school day, she was driving her son through streets thick with cars. Many were lumbering uphill toward Mulholland and its mountaintop cluster of private schools.

“To make it more difficult for parents is outrageous,” Plotkin said.

Even some who live in the hills fear that the proposed restrictions could keep them out of their own neighborhoods.

“If I want to go work out or go grocery shopping, I can’t get back to my house,” said Jami Abell-Venit, a stay-at-home mother of three who lives on Cananea Drive. “It limits gardeners, delivery people, household help and school buses ... not to mention those you might want to carpool with.”

Encino residents who live north of Ventura Boulevard are seething because they have been excluded from the voting. They say the traffic restrictions might shove the congestion across the boulevard and into their front yards.

The boulevard serves as a social railroad track of sorts, drawing a line between the northern, mostly middle-class flatlands and the wealthier enclaves in the hills to the south.

That divide is behind the sentiment that the traffic proposals are designed to pamper the well-to-do.

“They’re getting rid of the problem ‘south of’ and dumping it on the folks ‘north of,’” said Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino. Silver has been lobbying the city, so far unsuccessfully, to allow everyone in the community of 42,500 to vote on the proposed restrictions.

Residents in the hills say there is nothing elitist about wanting to back out of their driveways without risking a high-speed collision.

“You don’t know it until you live it, and we’ve lived it with agony all these years,” said Grossman, whose daughter’s car and fences have been among the casualties of cut-through drivers.

Dr. Guillermo Young, a pediatric cardiologist who lives a few streets away, enthusiastically agrees.

“If you try to make a left turn out of our house, they go crazy. They give you the ... finger,” Young said, raising his voice to be heard as car after car whooshed past his spacious hacienda.

“Can you imagine? We are imprisoned in our own house!”

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Times staff writer Andrea Perera contributed to this report.