Beverly Hills Studies Underground Traffic : Tunnel Under 1.6 Miles of Santa Monica Blvd. Suggested as Alternative to Street Widening

A tunnel in Beverly Hills’ future?

That’s just one of the ideas being studied by Caltrans as a way to alleviate traffic on about five miles of Santa Monica Boulevard between the San Diego Freeway and Fairfax Avenue. The first hearings, labeled “for the public to review project alternatives,” will be held Nov. 13 at the Beverly Hills Public Library.

Among proposals outlined by Rick Simon, an associate environmental planner with Caltrans, are:

--To do nothing;

--Do minor things such as posting parking restrictions during peak hours and marking bus turnouts;

--Widen the street;

--Put in a tunnel under the 1.6 mile-stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard through Beverly Hills.

Simon said, “The city of Beverly Hills proposed that instead of widening the street on the surface in Beverly Hills, we make two tunnels of two lanes each (under Santa Monica Boulevard), starting and ending at the city limits with two accesses along the way: one to service Wilshire Boulevard and one to service Beverly Boulevard. This would be done in conjunction with widening the street at both ends, in West Hollywood and in Los Angeles.”

Considering that Beverly Hills opposed building a freeway through town several years ago, the tunnel proposal was unexpected.

“We surprised them (at Caltrans) by saying that we’d fund a study if they would consider the tunnel as a legitimate alternative,” Irwin Kaplan, Beverly Hills planning director, said. “So we spent $100,000 to determine the feasibility and discovered that 40%--or nearly half--of the traffic on Santa Monica doesn’t want to be there. It’s just passing through the city. And we thought, if we could separate the through-traffic from the local traffic, it would make sense to the community.”

The tunnels wouldn’t hurt most Beverly Hills businesses, Greg Gann, vice president and district manager of the Grubb & Ellis Westside commercial real estate brokerage office, figures, “because the majority of the businesses, in the Golden Triangle area, attract destination-type traffic.

“If you’re trying to go to West Hollywood from West Los Angeles, you’ll try to go around the Triangle, not through it. So I wouldn’t anticipate anything of a negative impact except during construction.”

That would take an estimated 32 months. “And traffic there is pretty bad now,” Caltrans’ Simon said.

It would be expensive and take time, Kaplan acknowledged, “but it looks good if weighed against the alternatives. . . . You could put eight to 16 more lanes on Santa Monica, but you would always have to stop at the cross streets. Widening won’t make the problem go away.”

With increased tunnel technology, the idea might make even more sense in the future, he agreed, “and that’s what we’re looking for: not to fund construction of a tunnel today but to reserve the option to do it tomorrow”--maybe in five to 10 years, he added.