Congratulations to Mr. Alario for his successful effort to have a stop sign installed at the intersection of La Cañada Boulevard and Vista del Valle Road.
For 62 years, I have lived downhill from an elementary school. Before La Cañada became a city, several of my neighbors and I asked the County of Los Angeles to install a stop sign at the corner of Palm Drive and Lyans Drive. There was some reluctance to this request at first until the county did a speed and density of traffic study and agreed to install the stop sign to slow the downhill traffic on Palm Drive. We might as well have not bothered because for all these years drivers have ignored that stop sign; not even a “courtesy” tap on the brakes as they speed down the hill. These are parents of children themselves … what are they thinking?
When I moved here, there were no sidewalks and children walked on sloping asphalt designed to drain water from the street. There wasn’t even a painted white line to indicate to children not to stray too far into the traffic lane. The only thing that caused a pause in the speeding was the school bus, which made a pickup stop at Palm and Lyans. (My older son rode that bus to school.)
I would like to propose that a speed bump be installed on the downhill side of Palm Drive, not on the uphill side because that would impede the speed of heavy ER vehicles going up the hill to an emergency. Those heavy vehicles have to come to a complete stop to cross speed bumps and shouldn’t be slowed when on their way to an emergency!
There have been numerous dogs killed on Palm Drive and it’s only by sheerest luck that a child hasn’t been killed. Do we really want to wait for that to happen before speeding parents “wake up”? I’d love to hear of any possible viable plan to slow these unthinking parents. My email is Joanne.Treasure@gmail.com.
Joanne Berg
La Cañada Flintridge
First published in the April 20 print issue of the Outlook Valley Sun.
