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Quake Deals Blow to Freeway Double-Decking Plans

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The earthquake that rolled through Oakland on Tuesday, collapsing more than a mile of the upper deck of the 1950s-vintage Nimitz Freeway, also dealt a blow to the already weakened plan to add upper decks to three San Fernando Valley freeways.

The proposal to double-deck portions of the Ventura, San Diego and Hollywood freeways, first proposed two years ago, has never had many supporters in the Valley, and homeowner groups are uniformly opposed.

In the wake of the Northern California quake, in which at least 18 people were entombed in the collapsed freeway, opponents acquired new ammunition--the accusation that upper decks, even with modern engineering, will be unsafe in a major quake.

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“If double-decking wasn’t dead already in the Valley,” state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) said Thursday, “then the Oakland disaster will kill it.”

Robbins conceded that as freeway congestion builds in the future, “the politics of the community may change. But right now there is overwhelming opposition, and the Oakland freeway collapse will strengthen the opposition.”

But Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who fathered the double-decking plan, clung to his proposal in the wake of the Nimitz Freeway collapse.

“Are you going to stop building buildings because a few failed?” he asked. “When the traffic crunch comes, we have no other options. We cannot add more lanes because all of the right of way is used up, so we have to go up.

“Politically, double-decking has always been a tough sell, and this will make it tougher,” he conceded. He said the state Department of Transportation is “going to have to explain what happened in Oakland and assure people that it won’t happen with modern construction techniques. I think they’ll be able to do it.”

The double-deck proposal emerged from a study of future traffic conditions in the Valley conducted by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

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The study, completed in April, recommends that by the year 2010 an upper deck be added to the Ventura Freeway from Woodland Hills to the Hollywood Freeway, then south at least as far as Hollywood.

And congestion on the San Diego Freeway early in the next century will require an upper deck from Victory Boulevard to the Santa Monica Freeway, concluded the study, which was supervised by Bernson.

All three freeways are or soon will be expanded to the limit of the state-owned right of way, Caltrans engineers say, and homes or commercial structures hem in both sides in many places, making further expansion prohibitively costly.

The Ventura Freeway, now a patchwork of eight- and 10-lane sections, will be widened to a uniform 10 lanes in a two-year project expected to begin in December. Beyond that, Caltrans has no expansion plans, although the SCAG report projected that up to 14 or 16 lanes will be needed soon after the turn of the century.

Searching for ways to handle the projected future congestion, Caltrans in 1988 released a report concluding that an upper deck on the Ventura Freeway from Calabasas to Universal City was feasible, but would cost $910 million and displace more than 1,000 homes and businesses.

Caltrans said the best plan was an upper deck on pillars rising from the freeway’s north shoulder, with two lanes in each direction. Only buses and car pools would be allowed on the 18-mile-long deck, which would be designed largely for through traffic with only a handful of on- and off-ramps.

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Although they have said they were satisfied with the plan’s feasibility, Caltrans officials have steered clear of endorsing the double-deck proposal, saying they are waiting for Valley elected officials to indicate if they want it studied in more depth. Thus far, only Bernson has championed double-decking.

Caltrans recently began construction of a 2.6-mile upper deck on the Harbor Freeway just south of downtown, the first double-decking in Southern California. That upper deck, expected to cost $100 million, will be restricted to car pools and buses.

The Ventura Freeway plan has drawn angry reaction from homeowner group leaders, who said double-decked freeways would destroy much of the Valley’s suburban ambience. They contend that noise and air pollution from an upper deck would make nearby houses all but unlivable.

Encino homeowner leader Gerald A. Silver said after Tuesday’s quake that opponents “are even more bitterly opposed and will fight this more than ever.”

Woodland Hills attorney Roger Stanard, who heads a group of business leaders that has campaigned for Ventura Freeway expansion, said Thursday that the Oakland freeway collapse ends chances for an upper deck on the freeway, which he opposed.

“The public is already against the idea because of the visual blight, noise and the air pollution,” he said. “Now they’ll have safety concerns as well.”

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Because there are no other freeway expansion options, Stanard said, “we are going to have to make life style changes in the future. We’ll have to car-pool and ride public transportation.”

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