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Last month, for example, Simi Valley approved plans under which the city will pay its civic center employees $3 a day to car-pool or ride the bus. Ventura County’s air quality district, responding to extremely high ozone levels and federal pressure, is requiring city and county officials to force major employers to create such programs. Stratton points to a countywide effort to increase van pools and ride-sharing programs. In Simi Valley, where 60% of workers still drive daily to Los Angeles County, Mayor Greg Stratton opposes putting a transportation tax back on the ballot until other solutions are tried. to keep things manageable.”įox commutes each day to downtown Los Angeles, where he is employed as a firefighter. “We’ve got to be willing to spend some money so that we don’t get in the same situation that Los Angeles is in,” he said. In Thousand Oaks, where nearly half the work force commutes to Los Angeles County, Planning Commissioner Andy Fox said he favors more freeway construction projects.

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I don’t want to subsidize developers.”Ĭommuters are split on how to best resolve traffic problems that the future is sure to bring. “All you’re doing is promoting more growth. “You don’t solve traffic problems, air problems and water problems by building more roads,” Bauer said.

The Ventura County Environmental Coalition, which wrote the ballot argument against the sales tax measure last fall, took the same position. He said projects financed by the measure would simply open up new areas to development and pass the cost on to taxpayers, rather than to developers.īauer, who participates in a company van pool, said ride-sharing programs, mass transit and stricter limits on growth are the only ways to combat traffic congestion. Gherardi noted that Orange County voters rejected a similar measure three times before finally approving it last year.īut Bauer, who campaigned against the tax measure, said more money to expand freeways is not the answer to the transportation problems.

Plans are under way to put the sales tax measure back on the ballot in Ventura County, possibly by early next year. So far, I don’t think that has ever worked.” “They think you can stop growth by stopping transportation. “What you’re facing out there in Ventura County is people who don’t want any growth,” he added.

“I personally think freeways are the result of growth. “It’s the old argument: Do freeways cause growth or does growth cause freeways?” said Bill Charbonneau, Caltrans director of construction and maintenance projects in Ventura County. She and other transportation officials say an additional sales tax-such as the failed half-cent levy on November’s Ventura County ballot-is needed to solve problems that already exist. Gherardi insists that growth is inevitable and that failure to improve roadways can only make the problem worse. Solutions to the increasing traffic problems range from slow-growth strategies to increasing the sales tax in Ventura County to pay for road improvements. “It’s going to be bumper-to-bumper traffic into the future,” she said. “I think it is very clear that if the county is left to rely solely on the resources of the state to construct the projects we need, we can look at Orange County to see what is going to happen to us,” said Ginger Gherardi, executive director of the Ventura County Transportation Commission. Even today, traffic jams on the Simi Valley and Ventura freeways sometimes begin in Ventura County and continue through the San Fernando Valley during morning rush hours, commuters say.Ībout 138,000 vehicles a day crossed the Los Angeles County line east of Thousand Oaks on the Ventura Freeway in 1990, 172,000 will make the trip each day in the year 2000 and about 199,000 will pass daily in 2010, according to the California Department of Transportation.Īt the county line on the Simi Valley Freeway, there were 106,000 freeway trips a day last year and the number will increase to 146,500 in 10 years and to 185,000 in two decades, Caltrans predicts.

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