Two Pieces in Sunday's Daily Breeze.

Sunday's Daily Breeze blew in with two pieces important in the ongoing discussions revolving around Ponte Vista at San Pedro.

The little blurb that could have been easily missed involved the City of Lomita joining the City of Rancho Palos Verdes in their calls for a new environmental impact report to be circulated for the Ponte Vista development.

While there has been a reliable source within the City of L.A.'s administration claiming that the Planning Department will probably not require a new report to be circulated, it should be continued to be noted that many of the traffic counts taken on Western Avenue were taken while the roadway was impacted by two storm drain failures at one time, and another failure that occurred at a different time.

Now please remember folks, there are seven storm drains that go under Western Avenue between Palos Verdes Drive North and Summerland Avenue. Three of them have failed and been repaired.

The storm drain repair work that is being done in the City of Rancho Palos Verdes, does not impact Western Avenue at all, because the storm drains under Western are County owned, and not City owned.

And now, without further adoo or adon't, is the other article in Sunday's Daily Breeze.

I am going to post it here for the folks who don't receive the paper (shame on you) or those who don't live in the area, yet still don't read it online. (Andy, you are fine, cause I know you read it back in K.C. online, all the time).

1930s streets meet 2008 traffic
By Donna Littlejohn, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 02/24/2008 01:24:52 AM PST

Forget freeway congestion.

For San Pedro commuters, the morning rush-hour headache begins way before they ever hit the Harbor Freeway.

Making their way through the early-morning fog, locals often encounter the first of the traffic as soon as they round the corner heading out of their quiet hillside neighborhoods overlooking the harbor.

From there, coffee-sipping motorists travel down First, Seventh, Ninth, 13th and other heavily traveled connector streets onto one of only three major arteries that lead in and out of town.

Once they turn onto Gaffey Street toward the 110 Freeway, they sit some more. Traffic signals change from red to green - and often back to red again - while commuters wait to inch through the clogged intersections.

Paul Escala is a veteran of the San Pedro commuter drills.

He's experimented with taking different routes to get to the freeway from his home near Peck Park.

He's tried leaving home earlier. He's tried leaving his office in downtown Los Angeles a little bit later.

But Escala rarely manages to shave more than a few minutes from his commute time.
The bottom line about San Pedro's traffic: "It's gotten a lot worse," said Escala, 30, director for joint use development for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"Traffic is now starting to back up (on Summerland Avenue) right around Leland Park," he said. "I'd say it takes about 10 minutes to get from my house to the freeway."

That's a distance, he said, of about 1.5 miles.

So traffic is bad, what else is new?

After all, coping with traffic is a way of life in Southern California, a place of booming development where the car is king.

A 3-year-old report issued by the California Department of Transportation calculated that commuters in the Los Angeles-Orange County region spend three days a year sitting in traffic.
But in San Pedro - situated at the end of a peninsula - the problem is compounded by several factors.

The community is isolated by geography - hedged in by the Port of Los Angeles on the east, the ocean on the south and the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the west.

San Pedro's population was 74,176 in 1990. Census estimates for 2006 stood at 80,879.

Since the 1980s, growth also has exploded at the Port of Los Angeles, sending huge container trucks onto the community's eastern roadways to jockey for space with family sedans and SUVs.
And finally, the area's once-thriving hometown industries that employed so many local residents - fishing, the canneries and shipbuilding - have withered over the years. Most locals now commute out of town to work.

As a result, the three primary arteries leading in and out of San Pedro - Gaffey Street, the Harbor Freeway and Western Avenue - have become increasingly overburdened with traffic.
There aren't any easy, quick or cheap fixes.

But community leaders over the past few years have begun to grapple with how San Pedro's traffic dilemma can be addressed in the future.

"All of this needs to be looked at as we grow and as we look toward building a waterfront that will attract people from out of town," said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who represents the area.

Traditional bottlenecks are getting worse while new ones are developing: First Street and Western/Weymouth avenues, First and Gaffey, 13th and Gaffey, Channel Street at North Gaffey - and just about anywhere along the 4.3-mile-long Western Avenue when about a half-dozen public and private schools open or let out each day in adjacent neighborhoods.

Motorists desperately search for shortcuts through residential neighborhoods. Others are willing to consume more gas and travel miles out of their way to avoid the crunch, circling around or cutting through the scenic Palos Verdes Peninsula to reach the South Bay.

If residents think it's bad now, they could have more to gripe about in coming years.
New housing developments already are going up in San Pedro's downtown district. While the nearly 600 units provide needed new housing and a potential boon to local retailers, they also bring more people and more cars.

The proposed 1,950-unit Ponte Vista housing project on Western is still moving through a city study process.

A new cruise ship terminal in south San Pedro is being pushed by port officials who envision moving passengers through town by some kind of rail line or shuttle service.

Marshall's, a popular designer discount clothing store that boasts a high customer draw, will open soon at the Terraces Shopping Center on Western.

And a new Target store is scheduled to open in October at Gaffey and Capitol Drive, not far from more new homes under construction on that stretch of Gaffey.

It doesn't require advanced math skills to know what all of that means.

"We're going to see a big increase in traffic," said Diana Nave of the Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council.

Building new major roadways leading in or out of town isn't a viable option, and not much can be done in the way of widening the main roads that do exist.

So what can be done?

Traffic planners are relying in large part on a sophisticated traffic light synchronization system. Intersections along Western and Gaffey have both been targeted.

"We're very pleased with what we're seeing from signal synchronization," said Doug Failing, regional director for the California Department of Transportation.

Other improvements in progress or being studied being done or studied include more dedicated left-turn lanes and arrows, pull-out lanes for motorists entering the many shopping centers along Western, and more restrictive curbside parking hours to open up far right lanes on some busy streets.

Building wider ramps - or adding new ramps - to the Harbor Freeway and Vincent Thomas Bridge also are in the works or at least being talked about.

Future possibilities also include extending the city's light rail transit system into San Pedro. The San Pedro Community Plan process, now under way, has outlined several objectives to improve traffic flow, including new freeway on- and off-ramps, widening and restriping some streets and extending or reconnecting others.

To keep more residents from having to commute to jobs outside the area, port officials have recently joined forces with the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce to encourage environmentally friendly businesses to come to town.

The Port of Los Angeles also is moving forward with several multimillion-dollar projects designed to improve traffic on streets near the harbor, said Sue Lai, port senior traffic engineer.

A $21 million project, set for completion around 2012, will improve traffic flow and reduce truck-to-car conflicts on freeway ramps at the 110 Freeway and C Street by separating them into different lanes.

Farther south on John S. Gibson Boulevard, at a cost of $40 million and on a similar time schedule, trucks and automobiles will be given separate lanes in which to access the freeway.

In the future, the port also will look at creating new on-ramps and off-ramps to the freeway and bridge along Front Street, Lai said. One possibility is hooking a new ramp around the existing one, near the south side of Knoll Hill on port property now used as a temporary dog park.

Hahn would like to see a new Harbor Freeway off-ramp at Westmont Drive to accommodate the "choke points" created by the many trucks delivering and picking up goods at the
Port Distribution Center.

"We need to get those trucks off Gaffey and Channel where they are clogging commuter traffic," Hahn said.

The councilwoman sees one of the best solutions as extending a mass commuter rail line that would take San Pedro residents to downtown Los Angeles and to Los Angeles International Airport.

But that's more than a few years off.

In the meantime, planners continue to brainstorm on how to make San Pedro's streets and intersections, many dating back to the 1930s, more efficient.

And the residents? Most are trying to adjust the best they can. Escala said his commute time over eight years has "progressively gotten longer."

"Back in 1999, when I first started (working in downtown Los Angeles), it was about 45 to 50 minutes," he said. "Now it's at least an hour."

Commuting by bus? He's tried that, too. But that takes two hours. To catch the express bus going downtown, Escala said, San Pedro residents first must go to a transit center near the South Bay Galleria in Redondo Beach where the local line currently originates.

"Look, there are no more lanes (to add), we can't widen Gaffey any more," he said. "The traffic light synchronization? I don't think that's the answer either."

He agrees with Hahn that better mass transit would go a long way toward easing the commuter crunch.

"The bottom line is there are no alternatives for people to get out of their cars and to get onto public transportation," he said.

Some residents have given up and tried to escape. "My brother and sister-in-law left San Pedro three years ago because of the traffic," said Kay D'Ambrosi, 69, a retired registered nurse. "They couldn't take it anymore."

She added, however, that traffic since then has also multiplied around the couple's new home in Orange County.

"We really have to be careful," D'Ambrosi said. "Growth is necessary, but we have to be very careful about it because our quality of life is being impacted dramatically. I hope we can do something. We don't want to lose our small-town flavor."
___________________________________________________

Now it is with a great amount of wonder that I wonder if the Ms. D'Ambrosi quoted in this article is related to the other Ms. D'Ambrosi who stood up during a CAC meeting and made one of the most infamous quotes ever heard in San Pedro; "Bob Bisno is going to save San Pedro."

If you read farther into this blog, you can read about the signal synchronization that is going to take place in San Pedro and on Terminal Island between now and February, 2009.

I thank Ms. Littlejohn again, for writing another great article about what we are facing, traffic wise in OUR community.