Project to remove bottleneck on Newport at Menifee Road

Eastbound motorists on Newport Road begin seeing merge arrows at Calle Pompeii as they approach Menifee Road. Menifee 24/7 photos: Doug Spoon

Crews are scheduled to begin work next week to reconfigure the eastbound lanes of Newport Road approaching Menifee Road, eliminating a bottleneck that has confused drivers and resulted in accidents.

Jonathan Smith, city engineer, said the inside lane would be reconfigured as a third through traffic lane, thus eliminating the stretch of several hundred feet where an arrow on the pavement directs motorists to merge into the middle lane. Currently, the third lane disappears during that stretch to allow for the start of a second left-turn lane from eastbound Newport Road to northbound Menifee Road.

Besides having to merge lanes within a short distance on a heavily traveled roadway, the current configuration asks motorists planning to turn left at Menifee Road to merge to the right for just a few seconds, then merge left again into one of two left-turn lanes. The narrowed traffic surface stretches from Calle Pompeii to Menifee Road.

The Menifee City Council on March 21 approved an expenditure of $240,000 for the project -- $168,586 from the Capital Projects Fund and $71,414 from the Measure DD Fund, a tax increase measure designed for public safety, including road improvements. According to plans, the project will remove the existing double left turn pockets and portions of the existing median on Newport Road. The inside lane will continue east past Menifee Road, so no merger will be required. That will reduce the left-turn pockets to one lane. Reconfiguration will also be required east of Menifee Road for a distance of 1,200 feet.

The project also consists of installing a safety raised median/berm on Menifee Road "to restrict unsafe left turn movements out of the shopping centers located on each side of Menifee Road," according to city documents. Smith said funding for the reconfiguration on Newport Road will come from developer fees paid to the city. Measure DD funds will pay for the new median on Menifee Road, considered necessary from a safety standpoint.

Smith estimates that construction will take about 25 days. He has not finalized plans on possible lane closures during the project.

"We can't reduce lanes on Newport because traffic would be backed up to the (freeway) interchange," Smith said. "We will sequence all parts of the project to minimize traffic impact and do as much of the construction as we can at night."

The current median and lane design is still fairly new as part of a recent Newport Road widening project. Smith said he was overruled by former city manager Rob Johnson in final approval of the design that created the merged lane configuration, and he is pleased that the situation will be corrected.

According to Smith, the developer of the Stater Bros. shopping center at that intersection requested the current configuration under what is termed "ultimate improvements," or the best anticipated design for traffic at complete build-out of the city. That plan required two left-turn lanes both ways on Newport Road, and Smith said he objected because of the bottleneck problem.

"Part of the environmental study is identifying traffic impacts," Smith said. "We look at today, in the future and when the city is built out. The anticipation was that at build-out, we would have heavy left turns at that intersection. My disagreement was that we shouldn't do it now when we need three lanes going through.

"The developer wanted it and the previous administration listened to him. The developer got a traffic engineer to say it wouldn't be a problem. I said, 'Then you take full responsibility for the accidents that start happening,' and I put that in writing."

It is virtually impossible to predict what the greatest traffic needs for that intersection will be at build-out. For now, however, a problem is being addressed.

In these photos, motorists on eastbound Newport Road begin to merge right as the inside lane disappears into the middle lane.