If you've driven Saticoy Street between Woodlake Avenue and Chaminade Avenue lately, you've probably noticed something new: fencing, grading equipment, and a stretch of curb that looks like it's being rebuilt from scratch. Neighbors have been asking about it for months. On August 12, 2026, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission gave the answer some shape by approving the final design for a pedestrian bridge that will span Saticoy Street, connecting Chaminade College Preparatory's existing campus to a new one going up directly across the street.
A bridge over a school crossing sounds like a straightforward safety upgrade, and it is. But the more interesting story for anyone who lives near that stretch of Saticoy isn't the bridge itself. It's what's disappearing to make room for what's on the other end of it.
What's Actually Going Up
Chaminade's Main Campus sits on roughly 21 acres at 7500 North Chaminade Avenue, with additional frontage on Cohasset Street and Saticoy Street. The new bridge will carry students across Saticoy to a second parcel, nearly five acres directly across the street at Saticoy and Woodlake, where the school is building an aquatic center, new athletic fields, and additional parking. City planning documents describe the structure as reaching a maximum height of 45 feet over the street, enclosed with open-air metal panels so pedestrians are protected while crossing above traffic.
The safety rationale is specific rather than generic. Chaminade currently moves students, staff, and visitors across four separate street-level driveways on Cohasset, Chaminade Avenue, Keswick Street, and Saticoy Street, with the Keswick driveway operating as exit-only during drop-off and pickup. Adding a second campus across a commercial corridor without a grade-separated crossing would have meant sending more foot traffic through that same intersection at the exact times Saticoy already carries the most car traffic.
The Land Under the Bridge Used to Sell Groceries
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only look at the bridge. The parcel receiving Chaminade's new North Campus isn't raw land. It's the site of an existing shopping center that has, for years, included a supermarket and other commercial tenants. That center is being removed to make way for the school's expansion, not added to.
| Before (shopping center) | After (North Campus) | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use | Retail, including a former supermarket | Athletic fields, aquatic center, accessory parking |
| Saticoy Street driveways | 4 two-way driveways | 2 two-way driveways |
| Woodlake Avenue driveways | 2 two-way driveways | 1 two-way driveway |
| Total vehicle access points | 6 | 3 |
That drop from six driveways to three isn't a rounding error. Fewer curb cuts on a commercial stretch of Saticoy generally means fewer points where cars are braking, turning, or backing out into traffic during the day, which matters if you're the one behind them at 8:15 a.m.
Why the Traffic Study Found Fewer Cars, Not More
This is the detail most people would guess backward. A private school adding a second campus sounds like it should mean more cars on the street. The project's own traffic assessment found the opposite: because the shopping center's daily commercial trips are being removed rather than layered on top of, the project results in a net decrease of 1,355 daily vehicle trips compared to what the site generates today.
The mechanism is simple once you see it. A supermarket and its neighboring retail tenants pull in customers all day, every day, including weekends. Athletic fields, a pool, and school parking generate trips concentrated around practice times, games, and the existing school day, largely overlapping with traffic Saticoy Street already absorbs from the Main Campus. The corridor isn't picking up a second daily rush. It's trading one kind of traffic for a smaller, more predictable one.
What Construction Actually Sounds Like If You Live Nearby
For residents on the streets closest to the bridge work, the more immediate question is noise, not traffic. The project's environmental review modeled construction-period sound levels at specific addresses along the route. During bridge construction, projected noise at the residence at 23309 Saticoy Street was modeled at 67.0 dBA, with the Melba Street cul-de-sac homes at 58.7 dBA and the Bobbyboyar Avenue cul-de-sac homes at 54.4 dBA. For context, a bore or drill rig operating near the site can register between 80 and 100 dBA at close range, louder than a lawn mower. The mitigation plan calls for temporary noise barriers during the loudest phases specifically to keep levels at these homes below thresholds the city considers a significant increase.
None of this means construction near Saticoy will be silent. It means the loudest work is concentrated and time-limited, and the city's own modeling is public, so residents on those streets aren't guessing at what to expect.
What Stays the Same
Amid a project this size, it's worth knowing what isn't changing. Chaminade's maximum permitted enrollment stays capped at 1,360 students under the approved plan, meaning the campus expansion is about facilities, not a larger student body drawing more daily arrivals and departures. Existing structures on the Main Campus, including current bleachers and long-standing buildings, remain in place rather than being demolished for the new construction. And in a small footnote buried in the school's own filings: Chaminade was permitted years ago to build a pool on its Main Campus and never did. The aquatic center now moving forward is finally delivering on that old permission, just on the opposite side of Saticoy Street from where it was originally planned.
The Longer Arc
Chaminade has been part of this stretch of West Hills since 1961, when the high school relocated here from West Los Angeles. For most of that history, the school has operated as a single campus bounded by four residential streets. What's happening now is the first time it expands across a public street, and the bridge is the physical answer to a question the design had to solve either way: how do you let a campus grow without asking kids to cross a commercial corridor on foot, at street level, during the two most predictable rush periods of the day.
The construction fencing you've been driving past is the early, unglamorous part of that answer. The bridge overhead will be the visible one.
If you're weighing what a project like this means for a specific street, a specific commute, or a specific home near Saticoy, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal detail Bruce Barz tracks closely across West Hills. Reach out to schedule a free consultation if you want a read on how neighborhood changes like this one intersect with what you're trying to do next.
