No to Jake brake, please

GLENDALE ? The city wants to ask the state to install temporary signage on the Foothill (210) Freeway near Lowell Avenue dissuading truck drivers from using their engine brakes in that area.

The City Council will consider a resolution Tuesday that would direct staff members to submit an application with the California Traffic Control Devices committee requesting a sign be installed for a one-year experimental period, Councilman Ara Najarian said.

“Because these signs aren’t your typical traffic control devices, which staff would have authority to put up, you have to get approval,” he said.

Residents have complained for years about the noise trucks make when they activate their engine brakes ? or Jacobs (“Jake”) brakes ? as they travel on the eastbound Foothill (210) Freeway from the San Fernando Valley toward the San Gabriel Valley.

Because of a downward slope ? which passes through the La Tuna Canyon Pass, but levels out in the Glendale area, at about Lowell Avenue ? truck drivers will often activate their Jake brakes, instead of their wheel brakes, to slow down. Those brakes make a loud, sometimes irritating, sound, Crescenta Valley Town Council member Clair Rawlins said.

“Anybody that lives along the freeway, which I do, around 1:30 to 2 in the morning, you do hear them putting on the brakes,” he said. “It does wake people up.”

A week-long noise study conducted in January between Lowell Avenue on the west end of the freeway and Pennsylvania Avenue on the east found that noise levels exceeded a Caltrans standard of 66 decibels only nine hours out of a total of 672.

Since that study quashed hopes of a sound wall, the sign request is a next step in the ongoing attempt to relieve the issue of excessive noise for residents who live adjacent to the freeway, Najarian said.

Rawlins, who has lived about 20 feet from the freeway for more than 30 years, said he had to install double-pane glass in his living room because the noise is so loud.

“You could hardly hear yourself talk,” he said.

The study also found that although compression-release engine braking ? a technique that uses compressed air to slow down trucks, causing a choppy, staccato noise ? was evident, it was not extensive, Glendale’s noise consultant Fred Greve said.

Despite the study’s results, the signage could be a positive resolution, Najarian said.

“Hopefully these sings will be approved, and hopefully they will help reduce some of the noise issues the neighbors on both sides of the freeway have come to us about,” he said.

After the experimental year, the city would submit results on the sign’s effectiveness, at which point the state would decide whether to make the sign permanent and whether to adopt it as signage that other cities could use as well, Najarian said.

The sign, which would be about 36-inches-by-30-inches, would include the text, “truckers easy on the engine brake,” according to the report.

“I think there is no harm in it,” Councilman Rafi Manoukian said. “Even a 10% or 20% decrease in usage of the brakes would certainly be better than what it is today.”

Najarian, who also sits in the Metropolitan Transit Authority Board, vowed to continue looking at ways to possibly install sound walls in that area in the future, but the resolution could be a more immediate action to resolve the problem, he said.

“I will vote for it,” Najarian said. “There is no downside to it. At worst the situation would remain the same. At best, truckers would have a little consideration for our city and reduce their breaking.”