Traffic Circle

When City Council members voted two weeks ago to build a traffic circle at 4th Street and Central Avenue to slow drivers, they thought the decision would please residents, who had complained about cars and trucks zooming down Central to reach Long Beach. But a group of about 20 residents of 4th and 5th streets criticized the project Monday night, saying it would divert traffic from the intersection onto their streets.

Many a time, we've woken up to the sound of squealing tires. So it was difficult not to feel like a jerk as I cranked hard on the wheel for a tight left turn one evening, careening around my neighborhood traffic circle doing donuts in a new Nissan Juke. The Juke responded with compliance, hugging the curb with little effort. There's nothing like an adrenaline appetizer before dinner. With the Juke, Nissan Motor Co. is introducing a new concept: a "sport cross," or small, SUV-style alternative to the many compact hatchbacks that are coming on the market to lure tight-fisted, forcibly downsizing consumers.

The Public Works Department installed the city's first traffic circle in an effort to avert further motor vehicle accidents and deaths at the intersection of Heil Avenue and Saybrook Lane. The roundabout, as the configuration is called, is intended to establish a safer flow of traffic at an intersection where three people have died in recent years, said Bruce Gilmer, the city's associate traffic engineer.

There it was: an overpass bending gracefully over stalled traffic on Dubai's main highway. And there I was: driving through a sandy haze kicked up by construction equipment, plowing into dead ends and discovering a special boomtown brand of road rage as I rambled over a confusing web of roads freshly carved in the desert. But I knew -- somewhere, somehow -- there was a way onto that bridge. I found it after about 20 wearying minutes by tailing a taxi that I figured had far better local driving intuition.

The city will build a traffic circle at Central Avenue and 4th Street, an intersection residents say is dangerous because speeding cars and trucks use it as a shortcut to Long Beach. The City Council authorized the $50,000 project Monday after staff said the intersection did not meet the requirements for a stop sign or traffic light.

There is, of course, more to Venice than the motley, moveable carnival that is funky Ocean Front Walk, the city's premier pedestrian promenade for exhibitionists and sightseers. Venice also is a diverse, patchwork community of some pleasant, modest streets and a few unpleasant, immodest ones, with a smattering of architectural attractions and distractions blessed with a brisk ocean breeze.

The Orange traffic circle's North Glassell Street spoke will be closed Monday for the filming of a commercial for Snapple soft drinks. Propaganda Films will be setting up lights and cameras starting about 7 a.m. The rest of the traffic circle still will be open to shoppers and drivers, said Linda Boone, the city's interim economic development director. Producers will shoot a script involving Republicans on one side of the street and Democrats on the other.

They were braced for a rush on City Hall, even a bombardment of the mayor's hotline. But traffic engineers were surprised and relieved to discover that a preliminary test of reduced lanes at the traffic circle went over relatively well. "It was more successful than I thought," Orange Traffic Engineer Hamid Bahadori said. "I anticipated a higher level of confusion, if nothing else, just because of the element of surprise. It looked like a war zone with the sandbags and all."

Like God, there is a presence in this town that always was and always will be. Some adore it. Some fear it. There are those who seek to destroy it. But it appears to have been blessed with life everlasting, considering the current tax situation. The traffic circle, a four-legged beast that sucks in about 100,000 cars a day and spits them out in different directions, has been the source of great consternation, considerable debate and countless near-misses for at least 56 years.

To the uninitiated, it looks like just another traffic circle: a round, rotary intersection that whizzes motorists through a kind of automotive revolving door. But to the state Department of Transportation, it is a modern, British-style roundabout: a subtly, but significantly, improved version of the circular intersection that the agency hopes will revolutionize the way Californians drive.

A trip to Long Beach might turn up two artifacts dating to the 1930s that say something about the technology of that era. One is the Queen Mary, an Art Deco masterpiece. The other is the Los Alamitos Traffic Circle on Pacific Coast Highway. Unlike the Queen Mary, which was completed in 1936 and ranked as the largest passenger ship for many years before it was put out of commission in 1967, the circle is still in business.

The College of Cardinals elected an ultraconservative pope earlier this week under a ceiling replete with genitals, breasts and buttocks that apparently gave no offense. Good thing Michelangelo painted his Sistine Chapel masterpieces in Rome and not Venice -- California, that is.

Some people already find it hard to locate an address on 26th Street in Santa Monica without driving in circles. This week, motorists on a stretch of the street that runs through an affluent residential neighborhood near Montana Avenue will truly go round and round as the city opens a new kind of traffic circle. The new roundabout is one of many being built around the nation as planners embrace a new mantra in transportation planning known as "traffic calming."

Calabasas has its well-heeled residents driving in circles. But few seem to mind. The upper-crust community in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains is one of the latest California cities to build traffic circles and roundabouts. "It's good because it slows down traffic, and we have a lot of kids around here," said Randy Marks, who lives a few yards from one of several roundabouts installed over the last two years in Calabasas.

On L.A.'s Eastside, the term "Cinco Puntos" conjures up images of delicious tamales, fresh homemade tortillas and succulent pork carnitas. It's been been that way at the five-pointed intersection between the city of Los Angeles and unincorporated East L.A. since the landmark Cinco Puntos tortilleria opened there in 1966. During the Christmas holidays, for example, off-duty police officers have to be brought in to keep order as customers clamor for homemade tamales.

Residents on Dorothy Lane won't be seeing many commercial trucks driving past their homes anymore, but the speeding cars that use their street as a shortcut won't be forced to slow just yet. The City Council has decided to wait before voting on a recommendation to install traffic circles on Dorothy Lane between Longview Drive and Acacia Avenue. The round medians, placed at the center of intersections, are designed to slow traffic by forcing vehicles to drive around them.

History came full circle Monday as residents, street workers and Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski celebrated the rebirth of a round, long-abandoned traffic median. For decades, the crossing of Katherine Avenue and Archwood Street was nothing more than an unusually large intersection in the middle of a neighborhood of modest, 1920s-era homes.

Like God, there is a presence in this town that always was and always will be. Some adore it. Some fear it. There are those who seek to destroy it. But it appears to have been blessed with life everlasting, considering the current tax situation. The traffic circle, a four-legged beast that sucks in some 100,000 cars a day and spits them out in different directions, has been the source of great consternation, considerable debate and countless near-misses for at least 56 years.

History came full circle Monday as residents, street workers and Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski celebrated the rebirth of a round, long-abandoned traffic median. For decades, the crossing of Katherine Avenue and Archwood Street was nothing more than an unusually large intersection in the middle of a neighborhood of modest, 1920s-era homes.

History came full circle Monday as residents, street workers and Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski celebrated the rebirth of a round, long-abandoned traffic median in Van Nuys. For decades, the crossing of Katherine Avenue and Archwood Street was nothing more than an unusually large intersection in the middle of a neighborhood of modest, 1920s-era homes.