Top State Officials Reject Car-Pool Lane for Freeway

The Deukmejian Administration has rejected a demand from Southern California air-quality regulators that one of the new lanes on the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley be designated a diamond lane, officials said Friday.

Administration officials have “told us to bug off,” said Larry Berg, a director of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The AQMD’s only remaining option, he said, appears to be a lawsuit aimed at forcing the state to create such a lane, which is restricted to car pools and buses.

Berg said he has not decided whether to call for a vote on such a suit when the AQMD board meets Friday.

If the air-quality board declines to sue, a public-interest law firm might be willing to go to court instead, said Berg.

The board, which is seeking to increase car-pooling throughout the region, voted 8 to 2 last month to give Caltrans a month to reverse itself and agree to redesign the widened freeway to include an eastbound car-pool lane from Topanga Canyon Boulevard to the Hollywood Freeway.

Deadline Extended

The deadline for reversal was extended early in March when talks between AQMD officials and John K. Geoghegan, who oversees Caltrans as secretary of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, appeared to be bearing fruit.

But Gene Berthelsen, a spokesman in Sacramento for Geoghegan, confirmed Friday that the AQMD demand had been rejected, saying “the issue is closed and we’ve got to move on.”

Berthelsen said that the Administration supports diamond lanes “in general. But there was a process set up on the Ventura Freeway project, which we went through. We did not receive local support for the project. Local politicians, including the Board of Supervisors, were opposed.”

The air-quality panel’s demand is aimed at Caltrans’ plan to expand the freeway to five lanes each way from Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Universal City starting in about one year.

A related project that began last month to expand the freeway to four lanes each way between Valley Circle and Topanga Canyon boulevards will not be affected by the dispute.

Caltrans, which has three diamond lanes in operation in Southern California and is studying whether to add the lanes to more than a dozen other freeways in the region, first advocated a car-pool lane for the 101 freeway.

Needed to Avoid Congestion

Caltrans engineers sought to convince a committee of elected officials, business leaders and homeowner representatives that, without a diamond lane to encourage car-pooling, the new lanes would quickly bog down in congestion.

However, when advocates could muster only a 22-to-20 margin endorsing the diamond lane, the highway agency reversed itself and announced 13 months ago that the new eastbound lane would be open to all vehicles.

In the study committee vote, most business representatives favored the restricted lane, most homeowner leaders opposed it and elected officials were split about evenly.

In December, the AQMD board, its powers newly expanded by the Legislature, unexpectedly entered the fray.

Berg and other board members say their advocacy of car-pool lanes parallels a policy approved in December of seeking to reduce air pollution by forcing employers to induce workers to form car pools or ride buses.

AQMD officials say their goal is to cut rush-hour traffic by as much as 25% with ride-sharing regulations.

Caltrans officials have sought to dissuade the air-quality board from getting involved in the issue, arguing that substituting a diamond lane for a general-use lane at this point would force a one-year delay in the widening and add at least $30 million to the estimated $22-million cost of the project.

A year ago, the California Department of Transportation had estimated the extra cost of a diamond lane on the 101 freeway at $10 million.

Jerry B. Baxter, Caltrans Southern California director, said in a recent interview that the dramatic cost increase stems from a new Caltrans policy of requiring a four-foot separation between a car-pool lane and a general-use lane, rather than one foot as previously required and as first planned for the 101 freeway.

“That means we would have to widen some bridges and move some sound walls and retaining walls,” he said.

But he acknowledged that the four-foot separation, which is aimed at reducing accidents, “is not hard and fast. It’s just something we are strongly leaning toward.”