Give them a brake

The homes along Costa Mesa’s Loren Lane are like so many others. During the day, when parents are at work and kids are at school, the streets are quiet. The lawns are green, and some are even lined with white picket fences, and the only traffic you can hear is from cars whizzing by on Fairview Road, just a right turn away.

But there are two times of the day when parents along Loren Lane, and the other surrounding streets, say their streets are no longer empty and quiet, and that’s when residents become most alert — when school starts and ends.

Loren Lane is within walking distance of Killybrooke Elementary School, and because of that, this quiet neighborhood twice a day becomes a highway for arriving and departing cars and trucks while many of the school’s students venture to and from there.

“You have people that frequently go a little faster than they should,” said Costa Mesa traffic officer Oscar Reyes. “I’ve seen the consequences. It takes a toll on everyone.”

With all that in mind, Costa Mesa police have launched a campaign to remind drivers to slow down and be safe in the city’s residential areas: “Drive 25, Save a Life.”

The program, which brings increased speeding enforcement to specific communities around the city including large, yellow signs that can clearly be made out by drivers, is a spin-off of the “Keep Kids Alive, Drive 25” campaign introduced in March. While the department’s ties with the national campaign have concluded, traffic officer Cristina Goodfellow and others were able to wrangle money from Costa Mesa Community Foundation for the new campaign signs.

The mission behind March’s campaign and the new one is essentially the same — to have neighbors hold one another responsible for their driving habits.

“I’m out here hollerin’ all the time at cars,” said Mike Brumbaugh, a Loren Lane resident.

Brumbaugh joined a few other residents in the area last week to see the first of the Police Department’s signs posted. The signs will line one street for a little more than a week along with a trailer posting drivers’ speed as they pass it. After that, the trailer is replaced by traffic officers who will check to see if the message has sunk in to drivers, police said.

“Don’t let the one minute you save speeding on a residential street be the last minute of a child’s life,” Goodfellow said.

Any neighborhoods interested in participating in the program can contact Goodfellow through the department’s front desk at (714) 754-5281.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.