Thread: Carmageddon - L.A.'s 405 closing.....

Carmageddon predicted for L.A.'s 405 closing
By William M. Welch, USA TODAY|
LOS ANGELES — If there's anything that unites residents and visitors across the sprawling Southern California metropolis, it is despair over transportation, from clogged freeways to inadequate public transit.


By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY
Approximately 150 message signs have been activated and placed around Los Angeles County in preparation for the 405 closure during road construction this weekend.

That fearsome Los Angeles traffic is about to get much, much worse this weekend: A 10-mile stretch of the nation's busiest highway, Interstate 405, will be shut down for 53 hours as part of a $1 billion reconstruction project.

City and transit officials say the closing is necessary to demolish an overpass bridge. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, other officials — and even Erik Estrada, who as motorcycle cop "Ponch" patrolled the freeway on the TV show CHiPS in the late 1970s and early '80s — have been going on local broadcasts to warn that ensuing backups could be super-size.

"If you think it's bad now," Villaraigosa warns, "on July 16 and 17, it will be an absolute nightmare."

PHOTOS: Interstate 405 closed for repair
A road closing may seem a routine inconvenience elsewhere and hardly worth noting in cities devastated recently by floods, fires and tornadoes. But in car-dependent Los Angeles, the I-405 closing is being touted as not just the biggest traffic disruption in decades but also as an almost apocalyptic event that will be felt for miles and miles.

Call it Carmageddon.

"You need to stay away," says the California Department of Transportation regional director, Mike Miles.

"Pick this weekend to stay home," says L.A. Police Lt. Andrew Neiman. "If you think you're going to bypass the closure by some secret canyon route, you and a million other people have the same idea."

Interstate 405, also known as the San Diego Freeway or simply "the 405," is an almost 50-mile multilane bypass along the city's West Side, stretching from the San Fernando Valley southward to Irvine. There it rejoins Interstate 5, which continues on to the Mexico border.

It handles a half-million vehicles on a typical day, Miles says. One of them, in June 1994, was the white Ford Bronco carrying former football star O.J. Simpson on a televised slow-speed chase by police after the slayings of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

It is a reviled bottleneck, moving traffic slowly past the South Bay beaches, snaking around the entrance to Los Angeles International Airport and skirting the UCLA campus. It runs through the neighborhoods of the affluent-to-super-rich residents of coastal Santa Monica and Malibu, western Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Bel Air and the desirable, hidden canyon neighborhoods in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The area being closed, between I-10 and U.S. 101, is its most notorious section, climbing over the Sepulveda Pass between the San Fernando Valley and the rest of the city. A habitual commuting choke point, it is the last link of the 405 to be widened for car pool lanes.

The impact is likely to stretch far beyond that 10-mile patch of pavement.

Miles says the frenzied warnings are intended to make people realize they may be affected even if they aren't planning to go near the 405. In the region's tangled noodle of freeways, "we anticipate backups anywhere from 28 to 64 miles," he says. Traffic flows may be disrupted all the way to Kern and San Bernardino Counties to the north and east, he said, and perhaps even southward to San Diego County.

"Traffic is like water," Miles says. "It tries to find the path of least resistance."

Construction has closed lanes of the 405 off and on for more than a year, but this is the first complete shutdown. Officials say there is no other way to demolish the Mulholland Drive bridge.

Neighborhoods affected include super-expensive homes north of Sunset Boulevard, where prices can run $25 million to $50 million, says Syd Leibovitch, owner of Rodeo (pronounced Row-DAY-oh) Realty.

With so much money on the line, he and his agents aren't heeding the warnings.

"We're going to leave our offices open that weekend, and we're just going to hope for the best," he says. "It's going to be a nightmare for them, but they're still going to show (homes)."

The non-rich, of course, are most affected. Sepulveda Boulevard, which parallels the closed section of freeway, will be closed to all but residents to avoid being overwhelmed. It is dotted with small businesses whose owners are dismayed by the disruption.

"We're expecting to lose 50% to 80% of our business," says Mabel Escoton, owner of Mabel's Dog Grooming.

Maria Ortega, a groomer who commutes on the 405 from Culver City, says she can't afford to miss Saturday, her busiest workday. "If I can get here, I work. If not, I stay home," she says.

Down the street at Top Town Nails, salon owner Tracey Tran is closing for the weekend.

"All my employees cannot get to work, and my regular customers have been canceling for Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday already," Tran says. "Of course, everyone needs their income for that period. It's very inconvenient. But what can we do?"

At UCLA Medical Center, which operates two facilities on either side of the 405, Chief Operating Officer Shannon O'Kelley says doctors, nurses and other staff who need to be close by will be housed for the weekend in dorms, a campus hotel, unused hospital rooms and on cots and even gurneys. The hospital will have helicopters standing by for emergencies, and doctors are postponing procedures where possible.

Police, Highway Patrol and fire officials have reconfigured their response regions and are beefing up staffing, so responders can get to emergencies without trying to cross or go around the closed highway.

The L.A. Fire Department plans to put some emergency medical responders on motorcycles, Capt. Alicia Mathis says. The goal: to be at any call within five minutes, the department's standard on any day.

At LAX airport, where officials estimate 170,000 passengers will pass through each day, spokeswoman Nancy Castles says many of the 20,000 people who work at the airport on any day are being put on longer, 12-hour shifts, and some airport firefighters will stay at work all weekend. Hotels have been arranged for critical personnel.

For travelers, there will be fewer buses to the airport, many routed through other freeways or surface streets, adding hours to the trips. About 65,000 vehicles arrive or leave LAX every day, not including off-site parking, so airport officials are pleading with the public to make other arrangements, give themselves ample time and don't plan on car travel.

"Please," Castles says, "don't ask your friends to come pick you up."

At the construction site, contractors plan to lay a 6-foot bed of soil on top of the freeway to protect it from concrete chunks falling from the bridge. They plan to saw the bridge lengthwise and bring down two of its four lanes to permit construction of a longer bridge that will span a widened freeway beneath it.

Another closing will be scheduled in about a year to demolish the other side of the Mulholland bridge.

The freeway section will be closed at midnight Friday, but on-ramps and lanes will shut down earlier that evening. The freeway is to be reopened by 5 a.m. Monday morning. There will be no delays, says L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Dave Sotero.

"It's a highly choreographed event," he says. "By hook or crook, hell or high water, we will open the 405 Monday morning."

In light of all the warnings, some say the scare tactics may be so successful that traffic will be light this weekend.

Daniel Faigin, a computer security specialist and amateur historian of California freeways, says that's what happened in 1984, when drivers avoided the West Side when it hosted the Summer Olympics. "It's going to be bad, but it's not going to be as bad as they say it's going to be," Faigin says.

Still, he's not as confident that contractors will meet their timetable to reopen an hour before his daily crossing of the Sepulveda Pass in a car pool.

"Our van is probably not going to drive in on Monday morning," Faigin says. "I'm not sure it'll be open. We'll just work from home that day."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... eedfetcher

Alternative Mulholland Drive bridge plan could have saved money, lessened traffic woes

A rejected proposal for rebuilding the bridge could have saved anywhere from $4 million to $10 million and reduced the likelihood of serious traffic jams.

By Sam Allen and Ari Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times
July 10, 2011

For all the dread over the impending closure of the 405 Freeway, a significant amount of the disruption — and millions of dollars in extra costs — could have been avoided by an alternative plan that was blocked by a group of residents who raised aesthetic and other objections.

Now, hundreds of thousands of drivers face the possibility of epic traffic jams when the 405 is shut down next weekend and again next summer for the demolition of the Mulholland Drive bridge. And local residents will also pay the price: Mulholland Drive, which would have remained at four lanes under the alternative plan, will be reduced to two lanes for the next two years.

Officials said the discarded construction plan was developed specifically to lessen the blow of the bridge construction project, part of a $1-billion effort to widen the 405 freeway.

In February, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the California Department of Transportation presented a design scheme that would have built a new, realigned bridge before tearing down the old one. The plan won strong support from city and county leaders, who said it was more efficient, less costly and quicker than the original plan, which called for demolishing and rebuilding the existing bridge in two phases.

The alternative plan would have required shutting down the 405 for only one weekend instead of two.

But property owners in the tony hillside neighborhoods straddling the Sepulveda Pass rose up against the concept. They argued the less costly bridge and road design were not in keeping with Mulholland Drive's "unique and distinctly rustic character." Historic preservation groups sought an environmental impact report for the alternative design.

At one point, members of the Mulholland Scenic Parkway Design Review Board requested that transportation officials hire a "world-class" architect to design a new landmark bridge for the area.

"I think the community deserves something special," review board member and Woodland Hills resident Jack Dawson said in an interview Friday.

But officials at Caltrans and Metro, under pressure to complete the project by 2013, said they didn't have time to rework the bridge plans for a third time. So, they went back to the original concept. No new architect was hired. And the original bridge design—a fairly utilitarian concrete span that looks similar to the existing bridge—was not changed.

"I was pretty disappointed," said Mike Barbour, Metro's project director for the I-405 Sepulveda Pass Widening Project. "We were kind of like, 'Guys, what do you do? Do you keep fighting when you've got at least a handful of activists that are going to cause all these troubles, and you've got the Mulholland Design Review Board that's wanting some incredible, some ridiculous thing?'"

Dawson countered that his panel would have considered approving the alternate plan had Metro returned at a subsequent meeting and told the group it could not afford a more elaborate bridge. But Metro, he said, decided on its own to go back to the old plan.

Transportation officials estimated the alternative alignment could have saved $4 million to $10 million and between six months to a year of work. Approximately 40% of those savings would have come from cheaper demolition costs. Metro would also have had to do less temporary relocation of utilities. The rejected bridge design would have been slightly shorter than the existing one, Barbour said, meaning savings on construction materials and labor.

Planners considered pushing ahead with the alternative proposal, despite the opposition. But that course was deemed impractical because it could have required additional studies and promoted lawsuits that could have tied up the project indefinitely.

"It just wasn't worthwhile at that point," Barbour said.

Ironically, the unsuccessful plan supported by transportation officials was developed partly as a result of neighborhood concerns about the disruptions that would accompany any freeway shutdowns.

The first plans to rebuild the Mulholland Drive bridge were approved in 2008, after it was decided the existing structure had to go to make way for new carpool lanes being added to the 405.

The Community Advisory Committee, a panel of Westside and Valley neighborhood representatives set up by Metro that monitors the project, found drawbacks in the plan. Members were particularly concerned about the length of time the 405 would have to be shut down. The committee was enthusiastic when officials presented the alternative plan. But the new proposal drew a flurry of opposition letters from a smaller group of neighborhood groups in areas including Bel-Air Sky Crest and Brentwood.

Wendy-Sue Rosen, one of the activists against the alternative plan, said residents felt there wasn't enough data on its environmental impacts or on the road closures that would have been required.

Another key issue, she said, was a change in Mulholland Drive itself: The new bridge would have created a "T" intersection on the east side of the bridge in place of a gradual curve in the original plan.

Rosen's group, the Brentwood Residents Coalition, complained in a letter that the realigned bridge would "degrade the historic alignment and scenic character of the Mulholland Scenic Parkway."

The letter also hinted at legal action, stating that, because it lacked a new environmental impact report, the alternative plan was "an egregious violation" of state regulations.

At a tense public meeting on Feb. 17, Barbour pitched the new plan to the Design Review Board, a city committee made up of local residents that reviews new construction projects along Mulholland Drive.

Dozens of residents spoke in opposition to the new plan. The board members — three of whom are architects — questioned whether the city was missing an opportunity to create a new civic landmark.

Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, supported the alternative plan. But he said Metro could not risk a new lawsuit that would stall the project. So he agreed with the decision to push ahead with the original plan.

"As frustrating as it was to many of us, myself included, Metro made the right decision," said Yaroslavsky, whose staff has been chronicling the debate on his website. "They couldn't jeopardize the length of the project by a year or two."

Laurie Kelson, a member of the Community Advisory Committee, said she was "majorly disappointed" that the alternative plan wasn't adopted.

"We all worked really hard on this, it was a great idea that would have saved millions of taxpayer dollars," she said. "And it's not happening, it's gone."

sam.allen@latimes.com
ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 3905.story

405 Freeway carpool lane: Eric Garcetti calls smooth opening 'Carvana'


L.A. and county officials celebrated the opening of the new northbound carpool lane on the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

MARTHA GROVES contact the reporter

'This looks like carvana,' Mayor Eric Garcetti said about the new carpool lane on the 405

Zev Yaroslavsky praised residents near the 405 who put up with 'unspeakable disruptions' during construction

The new stretch of the 405 Freeway completes the nation's longest continuous carpool lane

After 4 1/2 years of construction, the 10-mile northbound carpool lane on the 405 Freeway opened Friday morning, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend and not a moment too soon for frustrated commuters and residents.
From a Getty Center balcony overlooking the busy highway, politicians and transportation engineers peered down on their handiwork and expressed joy, relief and even a bit of amazement that the epic project through the Sepulveda Pass had finally been accomplished.


New carpool lane on northbound 405 finally opens today


"This looks like 'carvana,'" said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, coining a new expression that recalled "Carmageddon," "Rampture" and "Jamzilla," nicknames for some of the construction-related closures that disrupted traffic on the nation's busiest urban interstate highway.

Indeed, the stretch through the Sepulveda Pass that opened early Friday morning was moving smoothly at midday as engineers, elected officials and legislative aides lauded the $1.1-billion project.

In addition to creating the carpool lane, workers demolished and rebuilt three bridges over the freeway, reconfigured ramps and erected more than 20 miles of new soundwalls and retaining walls.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the project had been hanging over his head for years, during which he and his staff listened to residents' howls about nighttime clanging and time-sapping detours.

"I've been asked many times ... 'Was it worth it?'" he said. "It was very much worth it. I wish it had been on time and on budget."


The project took about a year longer and cost about $100 million more than originally expected. Some clean-up work remains to be done, and occasional lane closures will be necessary through year's end.

Zaroslavsky praised the forbearance of residents near the construction zone, who had put up with "unspeakable disruptions to their lives."

Officials described the new carpool lane as an auspicious milestone in the region's effort to add capacity to a freeway system that has little room to grow.

The new stretch completes the nation's longest continuous carpool lane, running 70 miles from southern Orange County to near the northern tip of the San Fernando Valley. It matches the stretch on the southbound side.

About 300,000 vehicles travel this portion of the 405 each day, and that number is expected to grow dramatically.

Motorists in the carpool lane are expected to save about one minute per mile during peak hours. Transportation officials said they hoped the lane would encourage more commuters to use carpools and vanpools.

Garcetti praised Nick Patsaouras, a longtime transportation official whom the mayor picked months ago to work with Kiewit, the project contractor, and the various agencies involved to move the project forward.

Patsaouras said in an interview that he helped instill a missing sense of urgency.

"My focus," he said, "was to get the freeway to the drivers."

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...523-story.html