Traffic Wars : Residents Fume at Roads Used as Thoroughfares That Weren’t Built

About a year ago Rita Dobias and her husband, Bob, moved into a small suburban house in a Laguna Niguel subdivision in search of a little peace and quiet.

To hear them tell it, they have found neither.

Just last Saturday, Rita Dobias says, a car sped down Ridgeway Avenue, a meandering residential street, missed the right turn onto Caravel Place and came to a screeching halt in her driveway. While her husband and their dog ran for their lives, Rita says, with perhaps a little exaggeration, the driver backed up and sped off.

It is the kind of incident that has put the Dobiases and other residents of Sea Call, a subdivision of about 250 homes, in a fighting mood.

They say the problem was created when Sea Call and a larger development, Beacon Hill, were approved and occupied before promised access roads were completed. Those roads--Niguel Road and Camino del Avion--now end abruptly at the northern and southern entrances of Sea Call, instead of continuing around the subdivision and intersecting to the southeast of the development.

Sea Call Streets Used

The result is that residents of Beacon Hill cut through Sea Call’s residential streets to avoid a circuitous detour on their way to Crown Valley Parkway and Coast Highway.

To make matters worse, the land on which one of the unfinished roads is to be built is now for sale. Though county officials have promised that the road will be completed by May of 1989, construction cannot begin until the sale is complete.

To the residents of Sea Call, the whole situation is just one more example of how the county has overlooked the needs of its residents in a short-sighted effort to accommodate developers. And many, like Richard Colburn, a Sea Call resident who says he lives in fear that his 4-year-old son will be hit by a speeding car, are now asking: “Why should the housing industry be so protected?”

While acknowledging that predicaments like the one at Sea Call are indeed regrettable, county officials say they have ensured that it will not happen again. As of last February, the county began requiring developers to build major roadways before they can get building permits.

But that does not solve traffic problems, such as the one plaguing Sea Call, that were created before the new policy took effect. According to James Swatzel, a civil engineer for the county who made a detailed study of the Sea Call situation, those problems are not going to fade anytime soon.

‘Basically Poor Planning’

“This is not an isolated case,” he said of Sea Call. “It’s a result basically of poor planning.”

Courtney Wiercioch, an aide to Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district encompasses the Laguna Niguel area, also admitted that the planning process for Sea Call and its adjacent thoroughfares could have been better.

“We didn’t do it as well as we could have,” she said. “It’s a situation that is not perfect, and the supervisor is trying through all angles . . . to improve things as quickly as possible.”

But such assurances have done little to appease the residents of Sea Call, who fear it may be years before Niguel Road and Camino del Avion are completed, leaving them to bear the brunt of the traffic problem.

In a study done last April, Swatzel found that traffic on Sea Call’s residential streets was about 3 1/2 times what the roads were designed to bear. But in another one conducted in June, he found that figure had decreased to about twice the expected rate.

It is not clear why traffic through Sea Call has decreased. But Sea Call residents say they believe that it will get worse once again. And in the meantime, they say, they should not have to wait for someone to be killed in a traffic accident before the county agrees to block off the northern entrance of their community, at the intersection of Ridgeway Avenue and Niguel Road, through which most of the traffic is coming.

Last week about 40 Sea Call residents trailing children and baby strollers showed up at a meeting of the Orange County Traffic Committee to demand just that. But the traffic committee turned down their request on the grounds that a gated barrier would endanger the community’s safety by delaying fire trucks entering from the north and keeping sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers from entering at all.

Instead, the traffic committee recommended posting 25 m.p.h. speed signs, painting double yellow lines to keep motorists from cutting corners at intersections, adding some stop signs and increasing patrols of the community’s streets. The traffic committee’s recommendations are expected to be voted on by the Board of Supervisors next month.

In the meantime, some Sea Call residents say, if the county persists in what they see as an anemic response to a dangerous situation, they may just take matters into their own hands. And from the quiet confines of their suburban homes, some now speak darkly of stealing out at night to blockade the road and paint over the yellow lines, lines that they say will only encourage motorists to drive faster.