Freeway Bottleneck May Get Worse as Project Begins

Construction is moving forward on a $112-million project to eliminate what has become one of the worst bottlenecks north of Los Angeles: the Oxnard Boulevard and Ventura Freeway interchange in Ventura County.

But work on the four-year project that includes widening of the adjoining Santa Clara River bridge cannot move fast enough. Even without the usual accidents or stalled vehicles, traffic along this two-mile stretch of freeway often moves at a crawl.

And starting today, it is likely to get worse.

The northbound Oxnard Boulevard freeway connector will be shut down so a larger replacement overpass can be built, rerouting thousands of daily commuters and further clogging traffic along a section of freeway in which more than 160,000 vehicles pass each day. Preliminary work on the freeway and bridge projects began last year and has already added to the congestion.

On Friday and Saturday afternoons, when thousands of Los Angeles commuters head north to Santa Barbara for the weekend, traffic can back up more than 12 miles on the Ventura Freeway, snaking up the Conejo Grade.

At midday on Sundays, southbound traffic piles up, sometimes stretching 20 miles to the Santa Barbara County line.

As a result, motorists in growth-conscious Ventura County are increasingly finding themselves snarled in the type of bumper-to-bumper traffic that has become synonymous with Los Angeles freeways.

Once it’s completed in 2006, the freeway interchange and bridge project is expected to greatly improve traffic flow.

Or will it?

The recent opening of Oxnard’s new Esplanade shopping center, just south of the freeway, and the planned $750-million RiverPark residential and business development planned at the north end of the interchange are expected to generate thousands of new freeway motorists.

But traffic experts said future development around the heavily traveled interchange was factored in when the project was envisioned. The improvements should go a long way toward unsnarling traffic, they said.

“It’s going to eliminate the bottleneck that currently exists where traffic backs up on northbound 101 all the way to Camarillo on weekends and on most Friday evenings all year round,” said Joe Genovese, traffic engineer for the city of Oxnard. “That’ll disappear.”

In designing the improvements, engineers considered that the nearby Oxnard Boulevard onramp dumps thousands of vehicles a day onto the freeway at the point where it connects to the narrow Santa Clara River bridge. The bridge -- where traffic is expected to increase to more than 214,000 daily vehicle trips by 2020 -- would expand from seven to 12 lanes.

“We are comfortable that it can handle the traffic,” said Cynthia Daniels, an Oxnard traffic planner. “We took into account traffic from the existing Oxnard population and RiverPark.”

The massive RiverPark development would include 2,800 homes, three schools, a convention center, shops, restaurants and a 600-room hotel. Construction is slated to begin this year.

At build-out, RiverPark is expected to generate 94,000 daily vehicle trips. But the development is to be built in phases and work on the new interchange and bridge would be completed long before RiverPark, Daniels said.

“You have to remember: It’s a 20-year build-out,” she said. “It’s not all going up in the next two years.”

Other developments in the area are bound to pop up, however, putting more pressure on the freeway.

An Orange County investment firm announced last week its purchase of the 60-acre Wagon Wheel complex along the southwest corner of the interchange.

It’s not clear what the firm’s plans are. But Oxnard officials said they are certain that developing the site will be a top priority for its new owners. Past proposals have included an office park.

With the closure of the Oxnard Boulevard overpass today, drivers traveling north on the connector will be diverted along several routes. The detours will direct motorists along Vineyard Avenue, Gonzales Road, Rose Avenue and Town Center Drive to the freeway.

To absorb some of the extra vehicles that will be pouring onto the freeway from the various onramps, the California Department of Transportation plans to open a fourth lane on the northbound freeway by mid-May, officials said.

When the new and wider Oxnard Boulevard overpass is completed, drivers will have access to both northbound and southbound lanes of the freeway. Caltrans hopes to have one lane open in each direction on the new overpass by mid-2004.

Meanwhile, work on the Santa Clara River bridge replacement project is also moving ahead. The new bridge is to be built in several phases.

The first calls for construction of three new northbound lanes to be constructed alongside the existing span.

Northbound traffic then will shift to the new lanes and southbound traffic will move to the existing northbound lanes. The old southbound span will then be demolished and a new six-lane bridge erected.

Although traffic may be shifted back and forth, there will not be any fewer lanes throughout the duration of the project than there are now, Caltrans officials said.

Also, any road closures would be at night. During the day, a tow truck would roam the construction area, plucking crashed or stalled vehicles out of the way as quickly as possible.

Whether Ventura County motorists are headed for a new era of stop-and-go traffic remains to be seen. What experts do know is that freeway traffic is intensifying faster than the population is growing.

According to the latest census, more workers from both Ventura and Los Angeles counties are working in Ventura County now than a decade ago -- which means more cars on streets and freeways.

During the 1990s, the number of commuters from Ventura County to Los Angeles County dropped from 72,353 to 68,505. Meanwhile, commuters driving into the county from Los Angeles rose from 23,635 to 31,867.

Of Ventura County’s 345,648 employed residents, 263,460 live and work in the county. The overall population stands at 756,500.

The rise in traffic has helped spur a backlash against development countywide. The county and several cities have adopted some of the strictest growth-control measures in the nation.

In November, Thousand Oaks elected a slow-growth majority to its City Council, and voters in Ventura and Santa Paula rejected hillside development projects.

But Mark Schniepp, an economist with the California Economic Forecast in Santa Barbara, said cities must allow some growth or they will die. For too long, he said, local leaders have relied on slow-growth initiatives to handle traffic woes.

But housing development does not necessarily dictate job and traffic growth, he said.

“If we’re not going to build more homes, we should at least accommodate commuters,” Schniepp said.

For more information on the Ventura Freeway improvement project, check Caltrans Web site: www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/ven101/.