A Barnes Dance at Ventura and Newcastle?

In driving the kids car pool this week I saw no fewer than two accidents in two days in the Newcastle-Lindley area of Ventura Blvd.

In the first, an older woman pedestrian had been knocked flat at Lindley and Ventura and all I could see between the paramedics and fire trucks were her shoes pointing up like the Wicked Witch of the East. I hope she was ok. Later in the week I saw an elderly driver had crashed off the road by Fallas. I also have seen many near misses of elderly pedestrians at Newcastle and at that scary pedestrian crossing opposite Ralphs by Yarmouth.

As the number of elderly people increases in Encino, many of them pedestrians, and the traffic gets worse (you know it will), residents should take an interest in the issue.

Start with the excellent LA City Dept of City Planning documents that address the issue. This is a good overview (click on Policy Initiatives). With pedestrian crossings it only calls for curb extensions and mid-street crossing islands across the city. These are necessary at the crazy major intersections. But I hope a Barnes Dances, otherwise known as Pedestrian Scrambles might be considered as an experiment at a few intersections. You may be familiar with the one in Westwood at LeConte and Westwood Blvd. That could work at Newcastle/Ventura where the walkers, strollers and shopping carts are most numerous, perhaps with some modification of turning lanes and with curb extensions. I would settle for those if I couldn’t get a Barnes Dance.

If we do nothing, we put our elderly at unnecessary risk.

Other cities are bringing back Barnes Dances as density increases (the photo shows one in central Jerusalem). If I may quote Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times’ excellent architecture critic, “Los Angeles has plainly fallen behind other cities when it comes to innovative thinking about urban design.” I know the argument against Barnes Dances – it slows traffic down, etc – but so what? We need a message to some of the less responsible rush hour drivers to slow down. The worse the situation gets, the more parents drive their kids to school, thus adding more cars on the road. At the very least, more families should be carpooling and we should be having discussions about setting up semi-protected streets for kids to bike and walk to school.

But for now, is it too much to expect Encino Neighborhood Council’s committees to debate pedestrian crossings again, instead of focusing so much on cars?

Photo: Wikipedia