Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Ribbons of narrow private roads wind through local hillsides, causing headaches for delivery people and those responsible for police and fire service.

Winding private roads provide access to many hillside homes

By Clarence Cromwell

To get to Ben Bendixon's house, you have to go more than a mile up Greenwood Lane, a 12-foot-wide ribbon of pavement that crosses a tiny bridge and winds uphill between dozens of trees.

If you meet another car, one driver might have to back up to a space wide enough to pass.

At the top of the hill, past two signs that warn trespassers and unusually determined solicitors away, is the house Bendixon has owned since the 1950s.

His little black dog barks and snaps at visitors, but he doesn't bite; he just takes time to warm up to company.

Bendixon says he likes the privacy up on his hill, and he likes the country, where he can hike on his five-acre property.

"You pay for your peace and quiet," Bendixon said.

The hills of Los Gatos and Monte Sereno are crisscrossed with miles of narrow roads like Greenwood Lane, many of them cut decades ago by the narrowly placed wheels of horse-drawn wagons. Residents suffer a multiplicity of little agonies because of the unmarked ribbons of road that lead to their homes. But they like it here.

Most of the people up here see no traffic, except the comings and goings of their next-door neighbors, and deliveries from the postal service, UPS and Round Table Pizza.

The private roads remain, in many cases, in their original state, save for a layer of asphalt. They're still owned by the residents who live along them. Builders of modern-day subdivisions have to lay the streets by modern standards--20 feet wide at the very least--and give them to the city to sweep and maintain for the public. But municipalities don't want to groom secluded private roads, used only by a handful of residents.

Many roads can't be widened to local standards, even if the owners wanted, because the land alongside can't be bought or is too steep.

Some owners happen to like the rural atmosphere winding little roads create.

Monte Sereno offered an engineer to help residents widen the lower part of Greenwood Lane in the early 1980s, to handle ever-increasing flows of traffic to Ojai Drive. Thanks, the neighbors said, but no thanks.

Now the traffic angers some because residents have to pay for all the maintenance of that stretch of road, but numerous nearby neighbors, delivery trucks and construction vehicles use it for free.

Greenwood Lane resident Cathy Stannard said a letter went to her neighbors recently calling for donations to patch the road again. She will contribute, she said, but it appears that many who got the letter don't plan to do so.

"These turn into Hatfield-McCoy type feuds. That's one of the reasons I'd never want to live on a private road," said Lee Bowman, Los Gatos planning director.

In other places the repairs are less contentious.

Joel Gambord (who happens to be a Monte Sereno City Council candidate and the owner of the John Steinbeck house) said some 15 residents of upper Greenwood get together once a year for a wine and cheese party and write checks to resurface their stretch of the road. It costs about $150 per home. The last time they repaved about seven years ago, the job cost $10,000.

Michael Burke and seven neighbors share not only the costs but the work for their unnamed road that continues from the end of Burke Road near Shannon in Los Gatos. When the road needs patching, one of the neighbors usually buys a sack of driveway patching material and does the work; they've also been seen out in the rain with a shovel unclogging drain grates.

Burke said the road is in better shape than town-owned streets.

"Because we are responsible for it, we keep it up. If you choose to keep your road up better, you can. It's what you make of it."

Others who live on Los Gatos' private roads sometimes complain to the town that they want their potholes filled, said Scott Baker, director of building and engineering services. And it's especially hard to explain regulations if they've seen city crews mistakenly patching their private roads before.

Another oddity of private roads is the lack of road signs. It's impossible to discern Greenwood from the handful of unnamed streets that branch off it to clusters of houses 100 or so yards from the street.

The people who live there can be hard to find for any delivery person who dares to bring a parcel or a pizza into the area.

Then again, the lack of signs also confounds pesky visitors like door-to-door salesmen and newspaper reporters.

"I don't think we want people to find us," Greenwood Lane resident Cathy Stannard said.

After nine months in her new house, she said she doesn't want Greenwood widened because she's sure that would bring more traffic.

"Oh, it'll ruin the countryness," she said.

But a more serious concern is that narrow, unmarked roads hinder police and firefighters.

Central Fire District firefighters at the Quito Station tour a number of properties daily to learn how to access every house in the area.

But police and fire officials say they still have to jockey trucks and police cars up steep and winding 10 mph paths. They have to find one of the clusters of houses that lie off the private road more than 100 yards on an unnamed side road. Or they may have to find a house that's not clearly marked.

Property owners have been long concerned over the lack of hydrants in some areas. Bendixon, the Greenwood Lane resident, said San Jose Water Company asked for $50,000 to install a fire plug some five years ago. He and his nearest neighbor decided they couldn't afford it. Instead, Bendixon has three 1,000-gallon water storage tanks for dousing fires on his property.