Saratoga News

Miller Avenue residents say study a delaying tactic

Neighbors say process has been dragging

By Sarah Lombardo

The Saratoga City Council agreed last week to seek proposals from traffic consultants for a traffic study on Saratoga's Miller Avenue and the surrounding streets. The Oct. 21 decision means the issue will come back before the council Dec. 9, when councilmembers will review a request for proposals to be sent out to consultants.

The move is just the latest in a series of meetings between councilmembers and Miller Avenue-area residents, some of whom are getting impatient with the process.

"I'd like to see some conclusion one way or the other," Mark Stein, a Candy Court resident, told the council. "If you're not going to do anything about this, then just say you're not going to do anything about this, and we'll decide at the next election time what we want to do. If you are going to do something about it, then let's get on with it."

He isn't the only one who wants to get the ball rolling.

"I don't want to be sitting here a year from now with nothing having been done," Councilmember Stan Bogosian said.

The process, residents said, has been dragging on for years, beginning with meetings with the Public Safety Commission in 1992. Residents complained of excessive speeds and too many cars using Miller Avenue and parallel streets as a shortcut between Cox Avenue and Prospect Road. The problem, they said, has only gotten worse since the opening of Highway 85 in 1994, as out-of-towners began using Miller Avenue-area streets as a quick way to get to Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. Residents said the street has become dangerous.

City officials have maintained, however, that Miller Avenue was created as a connector street and is not receiving any more traffic than it should. Some have even expressed doubts about the existence of a real problem on that street.

Councilmember Don Wolfe said last week that he traveled the road many times in the past few months to get a reading of how dangerous the traffic and speeds are.

"I have always heard about this predicament on Miller. Well, I was looking for this predicament each time I went out there," he said. "I never felt unsafe." Wolfe added that he never encountered speeding and saw very few other cars, even when driving through the area during commute time on his way home from work.

Elmer Szanto, who has spearheaded the campaign to get some traffic-calming measures applied to Miller Avenue, said he was disappointed that some members of the council seem to doubt that Miller Avenue does have a problem. He said he was also frustrated that Interim City Manager Larry Perlin suggested the council seek more traffic data after Szanto and neighbors have already collected quite a bit.

"How much more information do you need?" he asked the council. "We've got enough data that has been collected. ... We have enough right there to proceed. Why give the staff and everybody more tasks to get more and more data? I think we have enough data to show that we have a problem on Miller."

In a phone interview with the Saratoga News, Szanto said, "The reason we gathered the facts ourselves was because we had always been told that the city didn't have the resources, and if we wanted it, we should get it ourselves."

The resources needed for this study would get into the thousands of dollars, Perlin told the council. Two proposals already received by the city, one from CCS Planning & Engineering and the other from Genesis Group Inc., estimated that a traffic study of the area would cost $4,000 or $17,000, respectively. A recent traffic study conducted on Baylor Avenue, which has problems similar to those cited on Miller Avenue, cost the city $5,900.

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