Tale of 2 Bureaucracies: 1 Bottleneck, Coming Up

Commuters who travel the Olsen-Madera Road corridor, which connects California 118 and 23, may have been wondering lately why there is a bottleneck on the border of Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, where a road-widening project appears to have stopped prematurely. The answer lies in municipal bureaucracies.

Thousand Oaks recently completed a road-widening project that took 18 months to finish and cost $2.7 million, according to that city’s traffic engineer, Jano Bagdanian. Thus, in Thousand Oaks, Olsen Road is a four-lane divided highway that smoothly flows to and from California 23.

In Simi Valley, however, where Olsen becomes Madera Road, an estimated 600-foot stretch of Madera annoyingly narrows on the westbound side from two lanes to one near the Thousand Oaks border--causing a rush-hour bottleneck. Traffic Engineer Bill Golubics says that’s because the developers of Wood Ranch, a large residential project on the south side of Madera Road, are responsible for the improvement but aren’t scheduled to begin work until next year. Plans call for the road to eventually be four lanes, two in each direction, as in Thousand Oaks.

“We’re working with them to expedite the process,” Golubics said of the private developers. “It would’ve been nice to get four lanes in place at the same time” as Thousand Oaks’ recently completed project, “but it just didn’t work out that way.”