Sounding Off: Nyes Place speeding a problem

As I lay in bed in the afternoon, recovering from a recent surgery, I listened to the cars zooming past our house and thought, for probably the 100th time, “Why can’t our street be like a normal residential street?”

Don’t we deserve some protection? Yes, the signs are posted “25 miles an hour,” as on other residential streets. What a joke! It isn’t as if we haven’t tried, my neighbors and I, over the years “” through the stays of three police chiefs, now the fourth in place.

When I see the faces of the drivers racing past at 45 mph (or more), they aren’t vicious. They are, for the most part, vacuous, empty, unthinking. They are driving as they do because these are the speeds they have always driven on our street. Because it is condoned. Because it is customary. Because the police leave them alone.

Yes, we have sent in our petitions signed by 90% of the families living on the street (one married couple abstained, citing a “live and let live” policy, a couple was out of town on vacation, one is a speeder himself).

We haven’t asked much, only on hour of police presence per month, giving speeding tickets, out of all the eight-hour shifts of all the police officers employed by the city. One hour. That would be all it would take, as the drivers are, by and large, always the same people. It would make all the difference. No one wants to pay the fine or take the time off to go to court to protest the citation. The argument from City Hall has always been that it wouldn’t be just that one hour: The police officer would then have to take time to go to court to defend the citation. Forget the defense! Relinquish the lost income if someone should protest the citation; most people don’t take the time and effort.

We haven’t asked for speed bumps or environmental modifications of the street, or automated surveillance equipment. Just one hour per month! We haven’t raised the specter of “a killer accident waiting to happen” or the possibility of negative liability and the subsequent financial drain on the city if such an accident were to occur. Just one hour. But a real citation-server hour, not just a two-minute “drive through.”

Our esteemed former Police Chief Michael Sellers, assured me by letter in January 2008 that, “Members of the patrol division will increase their visibility during peak travel periods” on our street. That has not happened. Not during “peak travel” or any other periods.

It’s depressing to look through the correspondence over the years regarding our plight.

In 1999, the city requested the Southern California Automobile Club (AAA) to prepare a report in response to complaints from residents on our street.

The 1999 report stated, “Beyond notifying motorists in clear and concise terms of the steep grade conditions, and doing so repeatedly, there is not a lot that can be done in the way of proactive treatments to actually bring about speed control.” The quote is from a letter from Derek Wieske, assistant city engineer, in September 2002. Our city seems to have taken the AAA report firmly to heart.

And yes, please let’s forget the “study” of a year ago of driving habits on the street. It’s almost too painful to remember that the checking of drivers’ speeds was done right of front of the sign that said “Your speed is” (the “radar message board”).

What a revelation that the findings revealed that “no one was exceeding the posted speed limit” on our street (with the exception of a couple of motorists who must have been either drunk or asleep as they approached the “Your speed is” sign.)

Hello, Nyes Place to City Hall: Anybody home in there?

MAXINE ANDERSON-GREFE lives in Laguna Beach.