Due to a high number of traffic accidents, Encinitas is considering making changes to a Coast Highway 101 roundabout near Paul Ecke-Central Elementary School.
In a year and a half, there have been 19 reported collisions at the El Portal roundabout, many of them involving drivers under the influence, a city staff report states. The majority of the collisions involved vehicles striking signs or street poles. Four of the collisions resulted in injuries, the report adds.
Because lots of children and their parents walk through that area on their way to and from school, there appears to be a need to install some protective measures along the edges of the relatively new roundabout to make certain speeding, out-of-control vehicles can’t come up on the sidewalk and injure pedestrians, city traffic engineer Abe Bandegan told the City Council last week.
Bandegan asked the council to authorize spending $40,000 to pay for rumble strips at the entrances to the roundabout and green-painted, metal bollard posts around part of the roundabout’s edges. Council members told him to come back with other solutions instead of the bollards, saying the green metal posts will look ugly. They suggested wooden wall structures instead.
“I don’t think the residents want the bollards,” Councilmember Jim O’Hara said.
He said the city spent a great deal to make the landscaping along this portion of Leucadia’s Coast Highway 101 look good, and added that he wasn’t keen generally on using bollards along the city’s roadways.
“I already think bollards are starting to cause a bit of tension in our community,” he said.
Prior to the November election, a majority of the City Council was pro-bollard, encouraging the use of plastic green ones along city roadways to separate bike lanes from vehicle traffic. The new council majority has argued that the prior group overemphasized bike transportation, as opposed to vehicles, and note that vehicles are the way that most people get around town.
At Wednesday’s council meeting, a handful of public speakers offered various solutions to the roundabout issue. Several people said they would like the city to also install flashing crosswalk beacons in the area, while frequent council meeting attendee Donna Westbrook said she thought the city ought to think about removing the roundabout and replacing it with traffic lights.
“Maybe you have a really bad design there and it should be something else,” she said.
Scott Campbell, who operates an advocacy group called Encinitas Citizen Review Panel, said he had reviewed all the traffic collision reports and found the accidents typically occurred late at night and involved impaired drivers.
“This isn’t a design issue, this is an enforcement issue,” he said as he urged the city to put more sheriff’s deputies on the street to catch drunken drivers, something the city’s mayor said will be part of the coming fiscal year’s budget.
The city staff report states that out of the 19 reported collisions between February 2023 and August 2024, there were 18 that occurred during nighttime hours. Twelve incidents were “attributed to drivers operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs,” six incidents involved excessive speed, and 10 involved vehicles “striking fixed objects, such as signs or streetlight poles.”
