By Ann K. Williams
Lookout Staff

August 30, 2011 -- Monday was the first day of school at Santa Monica College and Friends of Sunset Park (FOSP) manned the corner at 20th and Pearl streets to make sure the accompanying gridlock didn't go unnoticed.

Traffic flows smoothly on first day of school at SMC. Photo by Ann K. Williams

Representatives of the neighborhood group gave out home-baked sweet rolls and coffee to city notables and traffic engineers as they discussed whether or not the seemingly never-ending lines of cars idling in all directions were a decline or an improvement to the annual start-of-the-school-year traffic.

“The chaos is a little more organized,” said Mayor and former FOSP President Richard Bloom. “I ascribe it to that guy there,” he said, pointing to the man in the yellow vest controlling traffic – one of 25 college personnel trained by the Santa Monica Police Department for just this occasion.

Steve Strate, who's lived with his wife Jane a block away from the intersection for 26 years, seemed to think the traffic might have gotten a little better too, at least in the long term.

“They've been trying to do something about this for as long as I've been here,” said Strate.

“When we moved in it was actually worse,” he said. That was before preferential parking, he said, and college students routinely “were doing u-turns, not paying attention,” looking for a place to park.

“You had gridlock then, you have gridlock now,” Strate added.

But FOSP member Chris Thixton who lives right at Pearl Street ground zero thinks the problem has become intolerable.

Pearl and 20th has “exceeded its carrying capacity,” said Thixton. “You can't put this many cars in this intersection.”

“We have always understood the need of students to have proper parking, but we can't let them ruin our neighborhood,” FOSP Chair of the College Committee Regula Ziegler, a 40-year Sunset Park resident, said. “It's unacceptable.”

The presence of so many city officials – Bloom, Assistant to the City Manager Kate Vernez, SMPD Captain Carol Larson, Principal Transportation Engineer Sam Morrissey and Transportation Engineer Jay Dinkins – seemed to indicate that they were taking the problem seriously as well.

The city has been meeting with the school district, the college, the police and the Big Blue Bus to try to make things go smoothly, especially when the K-12 schools open on Tuesday.

“There's been tremendous cooperation,” said Vernez. “Hopefully...all the planning will alleviate the problem.”

Letters were sent to the neighbors warning them to plan ahead and drive carefully, said Big Blue Bus Customer Relations Manager Dan Dawson.

Big Blue Bus customer service representatives manned the busiest stops and supervisors were at intersections around the campus to make sure students knew where to get on the bus and things moved smoothly, he said. New schedules and maps that show bus route changes have been posted at www.bigbluebus.com

For its part, the college has tried to encourage students to leave their cars at home.

“Global citizenship starts with being a good local citizen and a good neighbor,” said SMC's Director of Sustainability Genevieve Bertone.

Students are urged to do their part to lower their carbon footprint and, at the same time, make their own education more sustainable by cutting out parking permits and other costs associated with driving, Bertone said.

The college sponsors free Big Blue Bus passes for students and Bikerowave which gives them free bike maintenance. Students who want to carpool are encouraged to log on to Zimride, where they can match up with others who have similar commutes.

Several FOSP members were concerned about a report that students would be given a two-week grace period before police ticketed them for parking in restricted parking zones.

Morrissey said that while the city had encouraged the college to provide temporary permits to its students, he did not think that the report about a grace period was right. A call to Don Patterson of the city's Finance Department confirmed Morrissey's claim.

Meanwhile, the security guard/traffic director at 20th and Pearl Streets was just trying to keep things moving.

“This is a mess,” he said. “I just came back from vacation to this.”