HASSLE-BOUND INTERSECTION REVEALS FLAWS; ROAD UPGRADES LAG BEHIND PROJECT.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Staff Writer

Community ire over traffic plans for a new market and restaurant at Ventura Boulevard and Canoga Avenue has forced the city to start considering public opinion at earlier stages in approving developments.

Still, that was not enough to solve traffic problems caused by the new Whole Foods Market and Burger King - and major traffic improvements there are not expected until next year.

Such confusion offers a glimpse at challenges the city faces as it struggles to solve traffic problems at 19 intersections along Ventura Boulevard, a main artery for the San Fernando Valley.

At the Canoga Avenue intersection, city officials said they anticipated traffic problems, but they decided to allow the market and restaurant to open so they could more accurately design solutions.

``It may be a reactive mode, but we like to observe the problem so we can understand it and come up with a most appropriate solution,'' said Alan Willis, senior transportation engineer in charge of the boulevard plans.

Under state law, Willis said, traffic mitigation measures ``should be constructed reasonably close to when the impacts occur'' but not necessarily before.

``We were considering this summer reasonably close. Sometimes the project gets way ahead of the street improvements. In this case, the project really was on a fast track,'' Willis said.

Building congestion 

The market and restaurant are wedged between the boulevard and a Ventura Freeway on-ramp, forcing customers entering and leaving the parking lot to thread through commuters squeezing onto the freeway.

A 1998 study found traffic at the intersection one of the worst on Ventura Boulevard, but local drivers say it has worsened with the addition of the market and restaurant.

``I think that's a problem,'' said West Hills resident Lila Aurich, a member of the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan Review Board. ``It's a very difficult thing in that people coming out of the market and out of the Burger King are immediately in the freeway on-ramp lane and have to move out of it and across if that's not where they're going.''

Fixes come later

For project approval, the developer was required to pay for widening the south side of Ventura to create a second left-turn lane. That work will not be done until next summer.

In the meantime, city officials said they are still considering changes to the area's traffic patterns, such as enacting turn restrictions and limiting on-street parking in front of the store.

Also, the store was built far enough back from Canoga Avenue so that in the future the street could be widened by five feet on the east side, Willis said. But the city will wait to perform that work only when - and if - the car dealership across Canoga decides to redevelop its property and give up five feet of land on the west side, he said.

That work is not required immediately because it is considered an improvement and not a mitigation, Willis said.

An unrelated but nearby traffic improvement included in the Warner Center Specific Plan is for Canoga Avenue to be widened by a lane on both sides under the freeway overpass, a project that could help traffic. That remains in the study stages, Willis said.

Flawed plan

The traffic plans for the Whole Foods and Burger King, no matter how lacking, are the result of new cooperation between the community and city.

According to the head of a citizens committee that reviews boulevard plans, the first traffic mitigation plans were drawn up with little public input and then presented as a fait accompli to the committee.

``Unfortunately, what happened was a situation where they came in with a plan first, before talking to merchants and people in the community,'' said Jonathan Sidy, president of the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan Review Board.

At the time, that was the Department of Transportation's standard approach to the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan, a master document that spells out ambitious traffic improvements for one of the San Fernando Valley's main east-west arteries.

The department typically would wait for a developer to make a proposal and then draw up projects loosely based on the Specific Plan, with minimal public input until after the plans were drafted.

``That's what got me going,'' Sidy said. ``As chair, I said, look, we can't keep coming in after the fact and after you guys wasted your time in doing drawings and react to them. Let's go out (into the community) first. There's a different way of doing this.''

Fixing intersections

By January, the city Department of Transportation expects to have tentative plans to improve 19 intersections on Ventura Boulevard. It would be done mostly by widening roadways, adding new lanes and restriping existing lanes to increase rush-hour capacity.

For the last six months, the DOT has held a series of community meetings to ask residents' opinions on the boulevard and their priorities for what should be fixed first. The idea is to get plans in place, and proactively pursue funding for some of them, before developers come along.

Willis said the new approach has helped his department better understand the community's priorities, as well as driving patterns, and has led to some changes in the original plans.

``A lot of the insight was provided not only by our field observations, but also talking to the community,'' Willis said.

Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, whose district includes the project, said there was eagerness in the community to build on the site, which used to hold a Farrell's ice cream parlor and a gas station, but had been vacant and depressed for years. She said there was general community support of the project.

``Sometimes when a place opens, it takes some time to settle in, as it gets higher volume initially when it opens than later,'' Miscikowski said.

The DOT will continue studying the traffic circulation patterns there to see if there are further changes that can be made, she said.

``It's worth taking a second look at it,'' Miscikowski said.

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Map: Woodland Hills