Turn ban to calm Maria/Paulina traffic
Left turns will be banned on North Paulina and North Maria avenues, from 190th Street, to throttle back cut-through traffic and speeding. Image courtesy City of Redondo Beach
A new set of City Council-approved traffic calming plans, residents hope, will put a cap on excess speeding and cut-throughs in one Redondo Beach neighborhood.
Redondo will restrict left turns, from 6:30 to 9 a.m., on to the 500 to 600 block of North Paulina Avenue, and the 700 to 800 block of North Maria Avenue. The city will also look at closing Paulina Avenue with a cul-de-sac to cut-off pass-through traffic.
Residents along the street have been concerned for years about traffic speeds and volumes on their quiet residential street. The blocks neighbor both Beryl Heights Elementary School and Redondo Union High School.
“The biggest problem is people taking their kids to and from Redondo Union,” one Paulina resident testified before the City Council. “They’re using our street as a cut-through.”
Traffic issues along these blocks have come to City Hall frequently, according to residents such as Paulina Avenue’s Candace Nafissi, who said that this has been a problem since 2008.
“Residents began to talk; they’ve become ill-informed and fear-mongering, and residents fear other residents going door-to-door, engaging in verbal fights,” Nafissi said. “The city has failed in addressing this traffic problem.”
Mary Simon, also of the 600 block of Paulina, has been on the receiving end of those verbal spats, having been yelled at by a neighbor presuming she was cutting through the street. But she’s more worried about the driving habits of passers-through.
“I watched a child try to cross the street; they would walk into the street, and cars would zoom by,” Simon said. “It took one young woman, in her late teens, to stop her car and let the child by. This is happening all the time, and there’s a lot of speeding as well. Someone is going to get hurt.”
Earlier this year, the city installed edge line striping, hatch lines, and pavement markings indicating the street’s 25 MPH speed limit along those blocks, which had some slowing effects. The issue, then, was pass-through traffic. Traffic flow studies conducted by the city found that traffic volumes down Maria and Paulina spiked in the mornings.
But residents have been torn as to what the city should do to stem the traffic and were almost evenly split on installing speed cushions to slow cars.
Councilman Christian Horvath, who represents one of the blocks, said that part of the problem is fixing attitudes.
“You can put as many doohickeys as you want, as many cops, but they’re not going to solve the problem for the people who decide ‘what the hell, I’m going to drive fast because I don’t care,’” Horvath said.
He recommended the city “split the baby” by splitting the Paulina block. He proposed following a staff recommendation to ban left turns from 190th Street during morning rush hour, which would funnel traffic down Prospect Avenue. But he also pitched splitting Paulina in two by installing a cul-de-sac barrier in the middle of the block, cutting-off pass-through traffic. Councilman Todd Loewenstein, who represents the Maria block seconded Horvath’s motion to study the cul-de-sac plan.
Though other council members quibbled about the idea, preferring bulb-outs and chicanes (obstacles) to slow traffic, the Council unanimously approved the plan. The signs will be installed in the next two to three weeks, according to staff.