Tunnel Vision May End Freeway Fight

It’s an elusive missing link in Los Angeles’ freeway system: A 6.2-mile dotted line on the map that transportation planners have for decades hoped would connect the Foothill Freeway in Pasadena with the Long Beach Freeway in Alhambra.

But that dotted line runs through a historic neighborhood of California Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets in South Pasadena. For nearly 50 years, residents there have fought the freeway. Just as tenaciously, residents of nearby traffic-weary cities, particularly Alhambra, have battled to have it built.

Now, some officials believe the solution to the standoff might lie beneath their feet. Earlier this month, they persuaded Congress to approve $2.4 million to study the possibility of extending the freeway through a five-mile, $2-billion tunnel that would run under South Pasadena and part of Pasadena.

The idea of building the longest continuous highway tunnel in the United States by digging under one of the country’s most crowded metropolitan regions may seem far-fetched.

Even if the feasibility study points the way forward, years of environmental impact reports, engineering plans and financial wrangles would remain. But supporters of the tunnel -- driven in part by a near-desperate desire to end the fighting over the freeway -- believe that several developments make the idea practical.

One involves the subject that rivals traffic as a Southern California obsession: real estate.

Over the last three decades, the California Department of Transportation has purchased more than 500 homes that occupy the potential freeway right of way. Most were bought a generation ago, many for prices in the $50,000 range. One was recently appraised for $780,000. Building a tunnel would allow Caltrans to sell most of the homes, although a change in state law would be needed to sell them at full-market prices.

“We’re probably sitting on half a billion worth of property,” said Ron Kosinski, Caltrans’ deputy district director for environmental planning.

On the other side of the ledger, finishing the freeway above ground would require taking more than 400 homes at a price, including relocation benefits, of about $1 million each, Kosinski estimates. “That’s $400 million right there for real estate,” he said. “That’s a substantial chunk of money.”

Combine the real estate with new techniques pioneered in Europe that lower the price of tunneling and the cost to taxpayers of putting the road 100 feet to 200 feet below ground may be not much more expensive than building on the surface, Caltrans officials say.

The tunnel idea has won surprising, though guarded, support from both sides of the battle -- preservationists who see the tunnel as a way to avoid destroying the neighborhood, and traffic-weary residents from Alhambra and surrounding cities.

“At this point in history, the tunnel alternative is the only viable way to explore completion of the 710 Freeway,” said Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, “keeping in mind the environmental, political and fiscal difficulties with a project that is approaching its 50th anniversary.”

It’s just possible, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), who sponsored the $2.4-million study, “that the elusive common ground for the 710 Freeway gap after all these years may be underground.”

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South Pasadenans have long suspected that a traffic light on Fremont Avenue and Alhambra Road is kept on green for a long time to usher an inordinately large number of cars into their city.

Their opposition to the freeway extension has become a national symbol of historic preservation.

For their part, Alhambrans a few years ago put up street barriers to divert traffic from their streets to South Pasadena -- a move that ended after city officials realized it was hurting their own businesses

“It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys,” Kosinski said. “They’ve been on opposite sides for generations or more, so they have that kind of blood pressure-raising perspective on each other.”

In South Pasadena, an upscale suburb of 24,000 people located eight miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the tunnel idea is being embraced -- to a point.

“I think the tunnel idea shows a lot of promise,” South Pasadena Councilman Mike Ten said. “It addresses age-old concerns about the destruction of neighborhoods and the uprooting of families and loss of very needed housing. It may be the solution all of us can live with.”

But some of the staunchest freeway opponents said they smell a trick.

“I think the whole idea of a tunnel is a Trojan horse to get the freeway,” said Joanne Nuckols, 62, who drives around town in a Volvo with a “NO 710” license plate. “There are those in town, those who have been around and part of the freeway fight for many years, who believe that this is a bait and switch.”

Down the road in Alhambra, a middle-class city of 85,000, resentment still runs high about South Pasadena’s unwillingness to compromise on the freeway. More than 100,000 cars that might otherwise be on the freeway drive through local streets in Alhambra and neighboring cities, according to Caltrans.

“They’re just very selfish people,” Barbara Messina, an Alhambra school board member, said of her neighbors to the north. “All they care about is trees and their beautiful homes. What about all the kids in my communities affected by all the pollution from stop-and-go traffic?”

For Messina and other Alhambra supporters of the freeway, a tunnel looks like a feasible alternative.

Similarly, a representative for El Sereno, a district of Los Angeles just west of Alhambra, also said a tunnel is better than a freeway even though the tunnel plan still could mean the removal of 100 homes there.

As for Caltrans officials, they just hope the fragile detente holds.

“There are folks who have been living for a large portion of their adult lives fighting the freeway, so they don’t want to say, ‘This works, never mind, go ahead,’ ” Kosinski said. “There’s an institutional, mental framework that has to be broken.”

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The five-mile tunnel, if built, would begin where the freeway ends in a stump on Valley Boulevard in Alhambra. It would surface between California and Del Mar avenues in Pasadena before connecting to a mile strip of the freeway that already exists south of the Foothill Freeway.

Engineers said the tunnel would be unbroken, except for a possible interchange at Huntington Drive in El Sereno.

The route would be nearly twice as long as Boston’s Big Dig or a similarly long passageway in Alaska, the longest road tunnels in the United States.

Exhaust from the underground roadway would be released and filtered through an elaborate venting system at ground level. The so-called air scrubbers would filter enough of the exhaust that it could actually result in cleaner emissions than with a surface freeway, said Mark Pisano, executive director for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Engineers said the tunnel could have two levels -- one for northbound traffic, the other for southbound traffic.

It is one of several huge tunnel projects under consideration across the country, including ones in Kentucky and Colorado and another that would connect Riverside County with Orange County by digging under the Cleveland National Forest.

The estimated $2-billion cost of a Long Beach Freeway tunnel at first looks considerably higher than the $1.4 billion price tag to build a surface freeway.

But the cost comparison does not include what Caltrans might be able to get for the houses it owns. Under current state law, if Caltrans were to resell the homes, it would have to do so at affordable-housing rates, with existing tenants getting right of first refusal, Kosinski said.

The agency is hoping to win changes in state law that would allow officials to sell them at full price, with the proceeds going to the tunnel project.

“We just had one home that was appraised at $780,000 and that we no longer need for the route,” he said. “We sold it for $68,000. It seemed not fair.”

The tunnel idea has already been the subject of a study by the Southern California Council of Governments, which enlisted help from consultants who built the Chunnel that links England and France below the English Channel.

Pisano said the consultants believed the tunnel could be built using a technique popular in Europe in which a large machine bores through the Earth and coats the tunnel way with a steel membrane, he said. That technique is considered less expensive than other tunnel-digging methods, he said.

Even though the costs of the tunnel are looking increasingly attractive, the $2-billion figure is still hefty considering that all of Southern California usually receives about $4 billion for all road improvements.

So Pisano said the tunnel would probably require some private financing and would likely require a toll. But for longtime freeway supporters, a toll might be a small price to pay to have the route finally complete.

“It’s going to happen, it’s going to happen in my lifetime,” said Messina, the Alhambra school board member. “I really believe that. If a tunnel is what it’s going to take, then that’s the answer to everybody’s problems.”

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Going underground

Caltrans is considering building a tunnel between the 710 and 210 freeways to avoid displacing the following number of residences in these cities:

Pasadena: 143

South Pasadena: 299

Los Angeles: 509

Alhambra: 25

Total: 976*

* Caltrans owns approximately 500 of those residences.

Sources: Caltrans, ESRI

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The longest dig

The proposed tunnel connecting the Long Beach and Foothill freeways, if built, would be nearly twice the length of any existing road tunnel in the United States. Longest tunnels (in miles):

Proposed 710 tunnel: 5

Massachusetts (Ted Williams): 2.6

Alaska (Anton Anderson): 2.6

New York (Brooklyn Battery): 1.7

Colorado (Eisenhower Memorial)1.7:

New York (Holland): 1.6

Sources: The World’s Longest Tunnel Page website, Caltrans, ESRI