Drive Will Be Faster--but for How Long? : Ventura Freeway: The widening project should be done by the end of next month. But officials say the added lanes will only bring temporary relief.

Delayed by everything from cold weather to riots, the $40-million Ventura Freeway widening project will finally wind down next month, more than a year behind schedule but close to budget.

But traffic experts continue to debate the most essential question behind the project: For how long will it ease congestion on one of the nation’s busiest freeways.

Even Caltrans officials acknowledge that it is only a matter of time before the relief brought by the widening project will be overtaken by increasing traffic.

“It’s hard to say how long it will ease congestion,” said Wallace Rothbart, Caltrans’ project studies chief for Southern California. “Over time, as a rule, we believe traffic will build up again, but it’s hard to say whether it’s three years, five years or what.”

When finished, the Ventura Freeway will have five lanes in each direction from Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Woodland Hills to Universal City, with a mile-long, six-lane eastbound section just west of the San Diego Freeway.

In the process, workers will have laid 227,000 tons of asphalt, driven 52,000 feet of piles and installed 20,000 feet of metal guard rails and more than 1 million pounds of reinforcing iron bars.

The project was started in November, 1989, and was expected to be completed by August, 1991. But Caltrans officials now expect to complete the job by the end of September, primarily because of delays attributed to bad weather and a score of three-day weekends that Caltrans is obliged to give the work crews but which were not calculated into the original work schedule.

To accommodate the additional lanes, crews are taking up most of the median, pushing the shoulders out with new retaining walls and reducing the width of most lanes by one foot, to 11 feet.

During the next two weeks, workers will be laying the final sections of asphalt around the San Diego Freeway interchange, completing re-striping work and doing improvements to the freeway’s drainage system. The final two weeks will be spent clearing weeds and working on landscaping projects along the freeway.

William Brady, a Canoga Park-based private traffic consultant, said the project will help ease traffic somewhat but he said he is concerned about elimination of the median shoulder area because it will mean that cars stalled in the fast lanes will not be able to pull off the road.

“A car stalls in the center and the whole freeway stops,” he said.

Rothbart disagrees, saying the medians have been removed on many other freeways in Los Angeles, including the Santa Monica Freeway, without dire consequences. Besides, he said, a city program called the Freeway Service Patrol provides a team of tow trucks that roam the freeways removing stalled cars.

Nick Jones, a Caltrans associate transportation engineer, said traffic on the Ventura Freeway has increased by about 1% annually for the past five years, from 277,000 cars per day in 1986 to 290,000 last year. He said the additional lanes may initially attract many commuters who have been avoiding freeway congestion by using alternative surface street routes or by driving in off-peak hours.

But he said the initial traffic increase will eventually scale back. “When you do a project like this, traffic is going to shift up and down until motorists get to a point where they feel comfortable,” he said.

Martin Wachs, a UCLA professor of urban planning, said it does not matter if increasing traffic once again brings traffic flow back to the same old stop-and-go speeds so long as the route can accommodate more motorists.

Rothbart agrees. “The increase of capacity clearly outweighs the problems associated with it,” he said.

But there are indications that traffic is not increasing at the rate transportation experts had once feared.

About 77% of commuters drive alone on a regular basis, with about 14% using car pools and 5% using buses, according to a 1992 report by the Commuter Transportation Services, Inc., a nonprofit firm that provides transportation services to government and private companies. Those percentages have remained roughly the same since 1989, according to the study.

The study, which surveyed more than 2,500 Los Angeles residents, also showed that between 1991 and 1992 the percentage of commuters using car pools or buses once or twice a week jumped from 26% to 31%, indicating that commuters are willing to use alternative transportation modes at least on occasion.

Freeway commuters seem to notice a difference, too. The percentage of freeway commuters who say freeway traffic is worse than the previous year has been dropping steadily for the past three years, from 72% in 1989 to 56% in 1992, according to the Commuter Transportation Services report.

Whatever happens to Los Angeles traffic, Caltrans officials say there is no room for further expansion beyond the current project. Businesses and homes now crowd the right of way on both sides.

The 15-mile project includes widening of bridges, repairing and resurfacing freeway pavement, rehabilitation and reconstruction of various ramps and the addition of sound walls.

Tutor-Saliba Corp. of Sylmar beat out two other companies to win a contract for the job with a bid of $36.9 million. Budget overruns have so far amounted to only about $1 million, or less than 3% of the total budget, according to Caltrans’ records.

Jim McAllister, the project’s resident engineer, said the cost overruns are due to unforeseen increases in the price of asphalt and additional labor and material for traffic control, repairs to irrigation systems and graffiti removal.

But he said the project will remain well below the $41.4 million that the California Department of Transportation set aside for the project.

When the contract was awarded, the job was expected to take 440 days of construction, which would have put completion at Aug. 20, 1991. But delays now put the completion date at about Sept. 20, 1992.

Of the 228 days added to the project’s construction time, McAllister said about half were due to bad weather. Construction was often stopped on cold nights because asphalt becomes hard, brittle and difficult to work when temperatures drop below 50 degrees. During the Los Angeles riots, Caltrans halted work for three days, fearing that work crews on the freeway would be the target of violence.

But the other half of the delays were due to a clause in the contract that gives workers three-day weekends under certain conditions, including whenever a legally designated holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday. McAllister said the long weekends were not calculated into the original contract.

To keep traffic flowing, Caltrans has required crews to do almost all work visible to passing motorists between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. and noon on weekends.

Although residents from Sherman Oaks to Tarzana have complained bitterly to McAllister about the nighttime construction noise, representatives of homeowner groups along the freeway say he has been quick to resolve the problems or to explain why the problem cannot be solved.

But now nearby residents worry that a proposal being considered by a county panel to build an elevated train on the freeway from Universal City to Woodland Hills will mean nighttime construction noise will continue for another two years.

“I think Caltrans has been great as far as responding to complaints,” said Polly Ward, vice president of the Studio City Homeowners Assn. “We are glad that the project is wrapping up, but we are concerned that it’s going to start all over again.”