A look at the year-over-year numbers from Santa Clarita’s busiest intersections indicates that traffic volumes actually declined last year at several lights, including the most traveled streets, Newhall Ranch and Bouquet Canyon roads.
Newhall Ranch is the most popular thoroughfare by a long shot, with the only intersection that sees more than 100,000 cars passing through daily, so the odds are you didn’t notice 800 fewer cars per day.
City officials recently shared data on traffic volumes and talked about how they study and work on local drives for daily commuters as Santa Clarita makes plans for significant growth: More than 10,000 new homes are expected to be approved by the end of the decade.
When traffic engineers evaluate Santa Clarita’s roads, they look at the service level that motorists are experiencing, which is given a grade, said Joel Bareng, assistant city engineer.
“So, when the intersections are looked at, we look at the delay of all the movements. You know that the triple-left turn, for example,” he said, referring to the three turning lanes at the city’s busiest intersection on Bouquet Canyon.
“You know that two left turns westbound is not enough, that it takes two to three cycles to get through. We add another lane so we can flush more for the same amount of green time,” Bareng said.
He acknowledged that, during peak traffic hours, the light can be “unstable at times” in terms of traffic timing, which is why it’s graded E. He also said there are no intersections at the city currently operating at a “force flow,” which would earn a level of F. Bareng explained that as when there’s not enough capacity to handle the volume of traffic.
“We’ve actually added triple-left turns (there with) separate projects,” he said, explaining how the Newhall Ranch-Bouquet intersection has been upgraded.
“For example, we started off with the eastbound triple-left turn. We added improvements … going southbound. You know, notice there’s some lanes, they actually are trap lanes to the left turns to increase (the) flow of through traffic through there. And then recently, we did a triple-left turn as part of the Bouquet (Canyon) realignment project. We’re adding a triple left turn going westbound.”
Up and down volume
There are also different parameters that are used to determine an intersection’s “grade,” Bareng said, which considers the turning movement count, or how many people are going right and left at each crossing.
The city’s state-of-the-art interconnected traffic camera technology enables engineers to generate such reports with push-button ease from Santa Clarita City Hall.
There are generally six intersections that are among the busiest, with the top two next to each other on Bouquet Canyon Road — Newhall Ranch (117,100 cars per day) and Soledad Canyon Road (90,100) — and two others that feed traffic to and from McBean Parkway, also on Newhall Ranch Road (88,100) and Valencia Boulevard (82,400).
Looking back several years, the data indicates city traffic engineers have dealt with significant fluctuation in their studies due in large part to COVID-19.
In March 2020, for example, the busiest intersection was the same as it is today, but the volume recorded that year in a prepandemic count was 105,000 vehicles per day. The following year, that figure dropped to 98,700, but by 2023, it had risen to 116,000.
The only real change in the top-five busiest intersections over the past five years has been the drop-off of Soledad Canyon and Sierra Highway, which last appeared in March 2020 tied with Soledad and Whites canyon roads at 79,000 cars.
For comparison’s sake, the Dodgers Stadium parking lot holds 16,000 vehicles at capacity, according to MLB.com.
Also in the data: Collisions aren’t just a numbers game.
Given the sheer volume of vehicles at the busiest intersection every day — an average of nearly 81 per minute — a correlation between the busiest and the most collisions would make sense. But the locations and number of crashes change each year, according to the city’s data.
For example, the busiest intersection had 11 crashes from July 2024 to June 2025 in the most recent data available, but the previous year, it wasn’t in the top five.
Soledad Canyon Road/Valencia Boulevard and Sierra Highway, which both run across most of the Santa Clarita Valley in different directions, are the most likely locations for an incident.
For 2024-25, the intersections with the highest number of collisions were:
• Newhall Ranch Road/Bouquet Canyon Road: 11.
• Sierra Highway/Golden Valley Road: 9.
• Soledad Canyon Road/Whites Canyon Road: 9.
• Soledad Canyon Road/Ruether Avenue: 8.
• Sierra Highway/Via Princessa: 8.
• Soledad Canyon Road/Bouquet Canyon Road: 8.
And for 2023-24, the list had slightly higher numbers:
• Valencia Boulevard/McBean Parkway: 13.
• Soledad Canyon Road/Sierra Highway: 13.
• Soledad Canyon Road/Bouquet Canyon Road: 13.
• Sierra Highway/Exit 6A North (at Chi-Chi’s Driveway): 12.
• Sierra Highway/Via Princessa: 11.
