101 Bottleneck May Get Worse Before It Gets Better

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 it is likely to get worse.

The northbound Oxnard Boulevard freeway connector was shut down Monday 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 projects began last year and has 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 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.

“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.

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.

With the closure of the Oxnard Boulevard overpass, 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.

A fourth lane on the northbound freeway is to open by mid-May, officials said.