County Gives Green Light To Traffic Signal

Caltrans plans to install a traffic signal on Highway 33 at Villanova Road. Signal would be fourth in Mira Monte

By Daryl Kelley
A fourth traffic signal will be installed on state Highway 33 in Mira Monte under an agreement approved Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors. But construction probably won’t begin until next year, officials said.
“It’s a Caltrans project, and when you’re dealing with Caltrans, you never really know,” said county transportation director Butch Britt.
Indeed, Tuesday’s approval marked the second time county supervisors have signed off on the same traffic light at the junction of Highway 33 and Villanova Road, next to the Rite Aid store.
The first time around, Caltrans intended to erect the light by 2006. But the project was allowed to languish due to an “administrative error,” Britt wrote in a memo to the board.
And now the cost has skyrocketed from about $175,000 to about $750,000, with the state paying two-thirds and the county the rest.
While the costs are high, Britt said the county didn’t have much choice but to approve the project again, because traffic counts and rush-hour congestion show it is needed, and the county and state have the funding for it. So government might be held liable if officials failed to move forward.
“If somebody had an accident there, they’d probably end up going to court,” he said. “And we’d end up answering questions about how much a person’s life is worth.”
The fourth Mira Monte traffic signal — augmenting those at Woodland Avenue, Baldwin Road and and Loma Drive — costs more than four times as much today as when the project was when originally approved in 2004, Britt said, because material costs have exploded and federal construction standards have become more stringent. Labor costs are also up sharply, he said.
“Traffic signal costs are way up all over Southern California,” Britt said. And the principal cause is that the steel arms that hold up signals must now be designed to withstand 100 mph winds, instead of 80 mph.
“It doesn’t seem like much, but it means they have to use more steel and more concrete and more heavy welds, and that makes a big difference in cost.”
In addition, the price of copper for wiring the light has soared, as has that of asphalt because it is an oil-based product.
“We haven’t changed the project’s scope much,” he said. “It’s just that everything costs more.”
The project has been broadened to include a cable connecting the new light with the one at Baldwin Road, so the signals will be coordinated. It has also been upgraded to include a signal-controlled walkway across 33 to the Ojai Valley Trail.
Despite a relative lack of population growth, Britt said Caltrans keeps adding traffic signals in the Ojai Valley because traffic keeps increasing.
“There hasn’t been much new development out there,” he said. “But there has been more and more event traffic, because people like to see Ojai. It’s Shangri La, right?”