Diamond Lane Study for San Diego Freeway Authorized
A group of Southern California transportation officials has taken the first step toward making one of the San Diego Freeway lanes a diamond lane after the freeway is widened--but it is a little early to start organizing car pools, a Caltrans engineer suggested Thursday.
The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission voted Wednesday to form a committee to study whether lanes restricted to car pools and buses are feasible on Interstate 405 between the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, a stretch of 48 1/2 miles.
The committee will focus on ways to use lanes to be added in five upcoming widening projects on the San Diego Freeway, commission staff members said. No existing lanes will be converted to diamond lanes, officials said.
It will probably be several years, however, before any of the widening projects are actually under way, said California Department of Transportation Senior Traffic Engineer David Kilmurray.
“If I had to guess,” he said, “three years would certainly be a logical estimate on getting under way with some of them. If you’re talking about the whole thing, that’s a little further in the future.”
He declined to estimate how much further.
“We just have to look at whether we would want to operate the whole route this way (with a diamond lane) or just portions of it,” Kilmurray said.
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