Traffic Safety Commission Hearing Regarding the Marymount Expansion Project-Part 2

Part two of the process is my 'show and tell' portion where I provide the promised illustrations and documentation to back up my claim that the Traffic and Circulation Section of the EIR is flawed and it does not contain some very important information that affects east Rancho Palos Verdes residents and others who use the Mira Vista Neighborhood to transit from one area to another.

With all of the illustrations, to enlarge them for better viewing, simply move your cursor over the image and click.

The Mira Vista Neighborhood was the only neighborhood mentioned during the meeting by parties on all sides of the issues. Therefore it is important to learn about that neighborhood and some important roadways that hundreds and thousands of folks use every day.

The Mira Vista Neighborhood is comprised of approximately 600 single-family homes and are the oldest tracts of housing in the Eastview area.

The Mira Vista Neighborhood is one of two neighborhoods in the city of Rancho Palos Verdes and the three other cities on the peninsula to have an L.A.U.S.D. school inside it.

Crestwood Street Elementary School has operated in the neighborhood since the 1950's when the area was part of unincorporated Los Angeles County.

The vast majority of students attending Crestwood live in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles due to the fact that students living within Rancho Palos Verdes, even directly across the street from the school are allowed to attend P.V.P.U.S.D. schools, which they do, to the tune of about 80% of all students living in the Eastview area.

The first illustration is of the area of the Mira Vista Neighborhood.

The neighborhoods boundaries consist of Western Avenue to the east, Miraleste Drive to the west, the canyon between Jaybrook and Caddington to the north and we share Summerland Avenue to the south with our neighbors in the San Pedro area of the city of Los Angeles.

The illustration includes colored routes associated with the TWO routes folks utilize to come into, out of, and cut through the Mira Vista Neighborhood.

The route colored in blue is associated with the Staff Report and EIR for the Marymount College Expansion Project. It is referred to as "Trudie" and it is the route suggested by planners as the ONLY route available from Western Avenue to Miraleste Drive via Via Colinita.

In red coloring is Crestwood Street, General Street, and Summerland Avenue. This route will be shown to actually have more vehicles using it than Trudie and it has been omitted from consideration in the Marymount College Expansion Project.

You also need to know that both the Trudie route and the Crestwood route contain speed humps on various streets.

Along Enrose, between Via Colinita and Summerland, the city of Los Angeles has placed one speed table, which is a little different from our city's speed humps.

In Mira Vista there are a number of speed humps on Trudie, Enrose, General and Fairhill, but there are no speed humps on the shared Summerland Avenue.

For many reasons, the Mira Vista Neighborhood received Traffic Calming in the form of some lowering of speed limits around Crestwood Street Elementary School and the speed humps now found in the neighborhood.

In fact, Mira Vista jumped over two other neighborhoods who had their residents request Traffic Calming before Mira Vista residents did.

Now to the next illustration.

The illustration above has the actual traffic counts before and after speed humps were provisioned in the Mira Vista Neighborhood.

The illustration shows the actual numbers of vehicles counted on the most eastern block of both Trudie Drive and Crestwood Street as they near Western Avenue.

In ALL cases, there are more vehicles counted using Crestwood Street at Western Avenue than there are using Trudie Drive at Western Avenue.

This document, and the studies were funded by the city of Rancho Palos Verdes and they have not been found to be in error.

The table also informs everyone as to the dates the counts were taken and those counts have been in the possession of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes since 2005!

It is AMAZING to me to see that the figures concerning Crestwood Street were not included in any studies for the Marymount Project.

When I asked the Planner for the Marymount Project why Crestwood Street and its majority vehicle traffic through Mira Vista was not included, I received no answer.

The next two illustrations taken from the Mira Vista Traffic Calming Project reports clearly show that the most impacted intersection relating to Mira Vista is NOT Trudie at Western, it is clearly Crestwood at Western.

The facts have been in front of us for years. Crestwood Street is more impacted by traffic flow than Trudie Drive is, with or without any mitigation at either intersections with Western Avenue.

Now it is time to provide illustrations found in the Traffic and Circulation Section and Appendix for the Marymount College Expansion Project.

I have not been able to find traffic counts at intersections like the ones provided during the Mira Vista Traffic Calming processes, but there are illustrations of traffic count found in the Marymount Project documents using other forms.

Crestwood Street at Western Avenue has been studies 'somewhat' for the Project, but as you can view below, the Marymount Plans do not include Crestwood Street as being any type of route used by drivers cutting through the Mira Vista Neighborhood.

In fact as you can see, the illustration of Crestwood Street does not even show the fact that it intersects with both Western Avenue AND Enrose. There is also NO illustrations of either Summerland Avenue or General Street, both of them have traffic going to and from the Marymount Campus every day the school is in session.

The traffic counts used for illustrating Trudie are marked in a yellow-bordered box that has the number "7" associated with it. Crestwood is Number 8 on the illustration.

Now below, is some more proof that Crestwood is more impacted. This time the information was taken from the illustration shown immediately above and placed in a format that I found more easy to understand.

There is a total of ONE occurrence where Trudie Drive is more impacted by folks turning off of or onto Western Avenue, than Crestwood Street is.

Crestwood Street continues a very short distance to the east of Western Avenue and goes to the Park Plaza Shopping Center and into Peck Park.

Trudie Drive becomes Capitol Drive as the pavement is involved with Western Avenue. Capitol Drive continues east through a residential area in ends at Gaffey Street adjacent to the parking lot of the new Target Store that opened in October, 2008.

Now it seems everyone is tired of all the studies that have been done, even the severely deficient ones and many people want some kind of quicker resolution to the Marymount issues.

When the lesser impacted intersection is used and the more impacted intersection is virtually ignored, it seems that either somebody somewhere didn't look at the records for the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, or they deliberately withheld studies that would have demonstrated more problems with traffic than some want to admit.

Someone picked the lesser of two evils and it was probably for the benefit of the proponents of the College's Expansion Project. I simply can't prove that yet.

There surely is some demonstration of ignorance on the part of at least a few folks to not consider the Crestwood situation when it has been around since at least March 10, 2005.

Either somebody didn't look or they were told not to look or there was a suggestion to overlook some important information.

If the Expansion Project goes through and new dormitories are built, there will be more impacts to the intersection of Crestwood and Western as students, faculty, and others go between the campus and Western Avenue and nobody can prove otherwise.

Part three will allow folks to view photographs of a two-year college with adjacent dormitories, located in California.