Traffic Management

Residents' complaints about speeding cars spilling onto neighborhood streets from nearby thoroughfares has prompted the city to commission a traffic study of Costa Mesa's east side. The City Council voted Monday to spend $30,000 for a survey of the area bounded by Newport Boulevard, Irvine Avenue, 17th Street and Del Mar and University drives. The results will be used to determine whether to install speed bumps or traffic "diverters."

The average speed of traffic along Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills during the afternoon rush hour has increased from 6.9 m.p.h. to just over 9 since a traffic management plan was put into effect in October, 1981, a report to the City Council said. The average speeds originally rose to 12.5 m.p.h. but increased congestion brought them down to 9 m.p.h.

When the South Coast Air Quality Management District adopted Regulation 15 in October, it spawned a whole new business. Local consultants are now looking at a potentially vast market of employers who need advice on complying with the new ride-sharing rule. But there is an obstacle. A few publicly funded agencies are already doing some of the same things the consultants want to charge for, and that miffs the consultants.

It was a magic time. For 16 days in the summer of 1984, driving to work seemed almost a joy--and then the XXIII Olympiad came to an end, officially closed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley with a prophetic quip: "The Games are over, let the traffic begin." The next day the freeways were congested, the rutted surface streets bumpy and crowded as ever.

It's hard to envision if you're stuck in Southern California's weekday commuter crawl, but the land that gave freeway gridlock to the nation is poised to help unclog the freeways.

Getting a jampacked stream of cars into Anaheim Stadium and easing the growling gridlock around Disneyland might seem a task fit for divine intervention. But this city has turned to a small, space-age computer room in an innocuous office building near City Hall for its traffic miracles.

On one wall of the fortress-like freeway nerve center in downtown Los Angeles are half a dozen video monitors that display much of the worst of any given day's freeway traffic in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. At least 1 million cars, trucks, buses and vans move in and out of Los Angeles County every day, flowing in from Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties onto the L.A. area's network of 27 freeways.

For the most part, Glen Friedman loves living in Cheviot Hills, a choice Westside neighborhood with undulating streets and gracious multimillion-dollar houses. If only he could get in and out of it. The same goes for Chuck Shephard, a lawyer in Century City who in spring 2004 had to allow 40 minutes to get from his desk to his son's 5 p.m. Pony League games at nearby Cheviot Hills Recreation Center. That's for a 1.4-mile trip that Mapquest, the online service, says should take three minutes.

Starting today, traffic on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Chatsworth and Canoga Park will be squeezed into one lane in each direction on weekdays because of road-improvement work, according to Caltrans. From 8:30 a.m to 3:30 p.m. each day this week, crews will be performing electrical work and removing median islands on the stretch of the boulevard between Sherman Way and Chatsworth Street.

Deukmejian Administration officials Wednesday unveiled the prototype of a computer-equipped car that they hope ultimately will be part of the solution to California's traffic congestion problems. Tests of the car will begin on the Santa Monica Freeway this summer and continue into 1991. The experimental car shown here comes equipped with a dashboard-mounted console that displays an electronic map of Los Angeles city streets warning the driver of accidents and other congestion problems.