The city is planning a construction project that will increase the traffic on Luneta Drive by approximately 500% this year.

If you're in shock, so are the rest of us. My name is Al Lipper. My family and I are your neighbor at 585 Luneta. We just found this out ourselves. I spoke with multiple people in the SLO city traffic planning department and confirmed that this is indeed the plan.

Fortunately, we still have time to stop this if we, as Luneta Drive residents, all speak up about it.

Here are the details:

At the end of Luneta (past Verde, next to Valencia apartments and the old frat house) the street is blocked by several posts to prevent through traffic. The city plans to remove these posts and also widen the road to two lanes to make it a thoroughfare to Broad street.

This would provide a shortcut for traffic from Foothill to Broad St. for traffic headed downtown or to the freeway.

The city has studied traffic flow on Luneta and determined it currently has about 300 cars per day travelling on it. They say it can handle up to 1500 cars per day on it. Therefore, they plan to make it a through street to direct traffic from other streets (specifically Ramona) to take Luneta. It is also possible that the traffic level may increase beyond 1500 cars per day.

Look out at the street now, and imagine what it would be like to have 5 times as much traffic.

But it gets worse. The city traffic division representative also told me that this expansion would mean not only more traffic, but as a through street, probably many more people speeding on Luneta.

Now look out at the street and imagine 5 times as much traffic as we have now speeding by your house at 40MPH.

We CAN stop this by letting city officials know that we don't want this.

Keep our neighborhood peaceful by "signing" this petition.

-- Al Lipper

(Luneta Drive resident)