For Willing Landowners, Freeway Widening Could Be Just the Ticket
Let’s say you lived or worked so close to the Ventura Freeway that your rafters rattled every time a car or truck went by, which happens more than 300,000 times a day.
Let’s say you were so close that the exhaust fumes could peel the paint off the walls and make your pet schnauzer light in the head.
And then one day you found out the state wanted to widen the freeway and pay good money to buy you out.
If not for the traffic, I’d be dancing down the middle of the 101.
All right, maybe that’s insensitive. I don’t stand to be forced out of a home or business, as do several hundred people. But before yet another weak-kneed politician panders to a few unhappy souls, I’m here to tell you that not everyone along the 101 is in a dither.
Take Nippy Phillips of Woodland Hills. Nippy, a retired golf course employee, was throwing some corn on the barbecue of his Woodland Hills home at the bottom of the Fallbrook offramp when I picked his house at random and rang the bell.
Nippy answered along with his wife, Octavia; his son, Scott; and his mutt, Tiger, and when I asked how they’d feel about someone from the state paying hard cash for their tidy little abode on Rigoletto Street, Nippy got a twinkle in his eye.
“Palm Springs, here we come!” he said.
Nippy says that once a month or so, for 37 years, some moron has come flying down that offramp like a bat out of Hades and cracked up, bringing out the rescue squad.
“You do get used to the noise,” Nippy said. But if he can cash out, buy a smaller place in the desert and play golf all day, it’d be like hitting the lottery.
To be honest, I’m not a big fan of widening the Ventura Freeway -- or the Long Beach Freeway, another proposal that would knock out 900 homes and businesses. I’m not in favor of doing anything that encourages more people to drive.
Like I’ve said, if it were up to me, I’d put up toll booths every few miles and raise the price of gas to $3 a gallon, and use the money to pay for more buses and trains.
But there’s always someone who’s got a problem with more buses.
And there’s always someone who’s got a problem with more trains.
And there’s always someone who’s got a problem with more roadway.
And so here we are, sitting in traffic like zombies, wasting our days and slowly but surely choking the life out of Greater Los Angeles while politicians twiddle their thumbs. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) started the week leading cheers for the Ventura Freeway expansion and then buckled at the first complaint.
Profiles in courage.
Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, said he’d rather have rail, but he’ll settle for the $3.4-billion Caltrans plan to add two carpool lanes in each direction of the 101 between Studio City and Thousand Oaks.
“Our position is that you have to be for something,” Reed said. “We could have had carpool lanes on the 101 years ago, if not for some world-class NIMBYs from Encino.”
I’m with him. But a four-lane expansion isn’t nearly ambitious enough. By the time it’s done, if it ever gets approved, the expected population increase may leave us worse off.
Having taken an extensive architectural tour along the Ventura Freeway and adjacent streets, I say we let the wrecking ball swing a little wider and add six or eight new lanes in each direction.
In addition to houses, apartments and a few public buildings, that would cost us a Taco Bell or two, the Westlake Lanes and several dozen strip malls that make you wish we’d have an occasional hurricane in L.A. The right shoulder of the new freeway would run through housewares at the Target on Ventura Boulevard.
“I think we need it,” Tony Martin said of the expansion plan. Martin installs hands-free cell phone setups for Mid Valley Paging in Tarzana Plaza, which sits roughly eight feet from the freeway and would have to relocate. “I drive all over L.A. every day, and it’s one of the worst.”
Roubik Dashdemirians and Sooren Swookias just sank $200,000 into remodeling the Tarzana Cafe Bakery in the same center. But I ate an Armenian pastry called nazook, and it was so delicious, I’m sure Roubik’s and Sooren’s customers will follow them anywhere.
I knocked on the door of a house for sale roughly 12 feet from the freeway, at Collins Street and Vanalden Avenue. The owners said they hope the proposed widening doesn’t kill a deal that’s in escrow. If the house survives, they said, the new owner will get used to the highway racket in time.
“I like the noise,” said the man of the house.
“It sounds like a stream,” said his daughter.
Remind me never to go fishing with these people.
At Coffee Junction in Tarzana, owners Sharon Benson and Linda Sherlin said they welcomed the idea of early retirement, should the state buy them out. “Bring it on!” Sherlin said.
But Nippy Phillips, who knows government moves even slower than traffic, isn’t packing for Palm Springs.
“You see this wall?” he said, pointing to the brick sound barrier on his stretch of the freeway.
“It was 15 years in the planning stage, and they just finished it yesterday.”
Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.
