All of Harbor Freeway Lanes Set for Closure

The Harbor Freeway, which for months has had lanes closed sporadically by construction near Exposition Park, will be closed completely before sunrise each Sunday for the rest of the year while an elevated “transitway” is built for buses and car-pools.

Early-morning closures start this weekend, when Caltrans will install the first pair of 130-ton trusses on existing Y-shaped columns, letting workers later in the week begin work on the deck over the freeway median--while 50 feet below traffic flows unimpeded.

Unless canceled by fog or rain, the closures will run from midnight Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday. Northbound lanes will be closed from Slauson Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, with traffic diverted to Broadway. Southbound lanes will be closed from King Boulevard to Imperial Highway, with traffic directed to Figueroa Street.

Caltrans officials said they designed the innovative $51-million construction project to disrupt commuters as little as possible and, to prove it, will keep the freeway open early Sunday, March 3, to accommodate spectators and participants in the Los Angeles Marathon.

“We don’t want to cause any problems for people driving to the marathon,” said project engineer Michael Perovich. “We want to stay out of trouble.”

Caltrans also will try to stay out of trouble by providing construction schedules in both English and Spanish through a 24-hour toll-free telephone service, by broadcasting news about the project over a low-power radio station and electronic message signs, and by hiring tow trucks to roam the freeway during rush hour and remove stalled cars at no cost.

Officer Bill Frio, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said previous closures have caused no traffic problems in the area.

Sean Skehan of the Los Angeles City Department of Transportation said Broadway and Figueroa Street are major thoroughfares that usually carry fewer than 100 vehicles an hour on early Sunday mornings, and have so far easily handled the diverted freeway traffic.

To ensure there are no problems Sunday, Skehan will monitor the streets personally so he can adjust stoplight timing and keep cars moving. The stoplights are timed so that cars moving at the 35-m.p.h. speed limit will not have to stop along the detour. At 5:30 a.m., Skehan will be joined by five city traffic control officers posted at key intersections.

Speeding has not been a problem. “They tend to get down to the right speed after the first two stoplights,” Skehan said.

“Because the stoplights are timed, it tends to keep people moving,” Skehan said, “so there is not a chance really for trouble to develop.”

However, Skehan said, special precautions are prudent this weekend because the construction method is untested.

“This is the real acid test,” he said. “In the past, the freeway was only closed briefly to move equipment to the median. Now they are going to use this new technology . . . and there might be problems no one anticipated.”

“It’ll be quite an operation to watch,” said Caltrans assistant regional director Jack Hallin, describing the unusual sight of a new highway being built atop one already carrying traffic. “But of course we don’t want people to watch as they drive by.”

To keep the freeway open during the week, Caltrans must build a platform on which workers can pour the concrete transitway road surface. The platform sits on the 132-foot-long, 35-foot-wide trusses, which Caltrans said are so big they can only be installed by temporarily closing the freeway on weekends.

When finished in 1994, the entire transitway will stretch 10.3 miles from the Santa Monica Freeway south to the Artesia Freeway. Its four lanes--two in each direction--will be separate from the freeway and will be for the exclusive use of buses, van pools and car pools.

For 7.7 miles, the transitway will run alongside a widened freeway. But in crowded South-Central Los Angeles, where land is costly, a narrow right of way forced Caltrans to double-deck the transitway on top of the freeway in two sections totaling 2.6 miles.

“The economics of the thing said we’d better be on viaducts and not try to buy up half the world,” said Hallin.

Hallin said the elevated transitway is designed to withstand a major earthquake during and after construction. Lessons learned in the collapse of a double-decked freeway in Oakland during the Oct. 17, 1989, earthquake have been applied to this project, he said.

The 8-foot-diameter columns supporting the transitway, for example, are sunk as deep as 70 feet into the ground and contain steel reinforcing bars that have been spliced and woven in a way that resists the kind of failures seen in Oakland, Hallin said.

“Earthquake-wise, it will stand up well,” he said.

Freeway Construction and Sunday Closings Caltrans is building a bus and car-pool “transitway” in the middle of the Harbor Freeway.From Slauson Avenue to Martin Luther King Boulevard, a new construction method will be usedto “double-deck” a section of the existing freeway. Construction will close a segment of the freeway from midnight to 8 a.m. every Sunday morning for one year, but the freeway will be opento traffic the rest of the time while construction continues overhead. Alternative Routes When construction closes the freeway before sunrise each Sunday: 1.) Northbound traffic will be diverted onto Broadway at Slauson Avenue and will rejointhe freeway at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. 2.) Southbound traffic will be diverted onto Figueroa Street at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevardand will rejoin the freeway at Imperial Highway. Adding the Double Deck Next phase of construction will add the second level of freeway: A) Concrete support structures have been completed. B) in next phase, huge steel trusses will be affixed to support structures. C) Molds will be built on trusses and filled with concrete to make the upper deck.