Intersection to be changed on Lindero Canyon Road
By Michael Picarella
Acorn Staff Writer

A temporary modification to the median on Lindero Canyon Road at Pierce Bros. Valley Oaks Memorial in Westlake Village was approved last week by the city council and is effective immediately due to numerous vehicle accidents.

The change will eliminate left turns from the cemetery onto southbound Lindero Canyon Road and left turns from northbound Lindero Canyon Road into Village Green Office Park.

The city of Westlake Village has few vehicle collisions, but the southbound Lindero Canyon Road just north of Via Colinas was re-striped to allow a third lane about three years ago, and accidents have more than doubled since then. The Westlake Village City Council in December approved permanent modifications that will be com- pleted in the future, but until then, a temporary modification will be made.

The problem, according to Westlake Village city engineer Mark Wessel, is that when traffic fills up on the southbound side of Lindero Canyon Road, motorists traveling northbound who wish to make a left turn through the median into the entrance of Village Green Office Park opposite Valley Oaks Memorial Park are allowed to do so by oncoming motorists in the first two southbound lanes. But drivers in the southbound curb lane don’t see the left turning traffic, which causes the accidents.

"What city traffic engineers sometimes do—historically," Wessel said, "is, they would keep what was called an accident pin map. And it was literally a map of the city on the wall, and where there were accidents you’d push a pin into the wall. And over time, you can start seeing where there’s a cluster of pins, that that’s a relatively high accident concentration spot."

This information is now kept on a computer, and each "pin" or accident can be researched to determine its type (whether it was a drunk driving wreck or attributable to other conditions, etc.) The northbound left turn into the office building entrance, Wessel said, is the most common type of accident on Lindero Canyon Road.

Wessel went back several years to find patterns. From 1989 to 1999, two collisions occurred while making left turns into the office park entrance. After a third lane was added in 1999, five similar collisions, from 2000 to 2001 have occurred.

"You can do the math," Wessel said. "That’s an accident rate that is several times as high."

The temporary fix—as with the permanent modification—will permit southbound drivers to make left turns into the cemetery, but will prohibit all other maneuvers through the median.

"What we will be doing," Wessel said, "is closing off that northbound left-turn pocket, so it’ll be a full-width median. For the southbound, we’ll leave the left-turn pocket for traffic going southbound (so they can) turn left into the cemetery. And then we’ll be constructing what we call a worm in the opening so that if you’re southbound and want to make a left, you can go through the median, but nobody else can. It will not permit any other movements through the median."

Wessel compared the design with that of the median worm near The Marketplace (where Albertson’s supermarket is located) on Lindero Canyon Road.

Affected property owners agreed with the modification.

But representatives of Pierce Bros. were concerned about the temporary fix because it prohibits left turns from Valley Oaks onto Lindero Canyon.

The difference between the temporary fix and the permanent modification, Wessel said, is cosmetics. The current northbound left turn lane into the  office park entrance will be temporarily striped out with yellow paint, suggesting no movement through the zone and no left turn. The worm will be built as Wessel explained, but it won’t be landscaped—just a curb.

The permanent project will include the construction of a wider median to fill in the striped road and added landscaping to fill it in, similar to other medians in the city.

As part of the permanent modification, the public safety committee suggested that a plan be devised to increase storage for northbound left turns at the Lindero Canyon Road-Thousand Oaks Boulevard intersection.

This project, Wessel said, will be part of the Arterial System Financing Program undertaking (already in design) to begin late next year. It’ll take several months to complete, Wessel said.

The temporary median project’s construction will affect traffic, Wessel said. But the work should only take a couple of days to complete and the fast lane will probably be the only lane to be closed, he said. And the lanes will only be closed during off-peak hours, Wessel said.