Road Projects Take Back Seat to Seismic Work

Millions of dollars in road projects designed to ease congestion on Los Angeles’ clogged freeways face lengthy delays because of a severe financial crisis in the state’s transportation program.

Rail projects critical to getting residents out of their cars may also be vulnerable as state officials attempt to make good on their promise to give highway earthquake safety first priority for scarce transportation dollars.

For Los Angeles County the crisis means that everything from the long-awaited extension of the Foothill Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley to the completion of a system of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes along the San Diego Freeway may be put on hold.

Even mass transit projects such as the extension of the Blue Line to Pasadena and the planned east-west San Fernando Valley rail line could be postponed as officials try to squeeze enough funds out of road and rail projects to pay for strengthening of highway bridges susceptible to damage in severe earthquakes.

The official estimate is that the projects will be delayed at least a year, but other transportation experts predict that it could be much longer, as the state continues to identify more bridges in need of earthquake retrofitting.

The revenue crisis is “going to ricochet back and forth, up and down the state,” said California Transportation Commission Chairwoman Octavia Diener. “A lot of projects are going to be stretched out and take a lot longer to build, and it already takes too long to build these things.”

Transportation officials will use the summer months to formally pick and choose among the projects and identify which will be postponed to free up funds for retrofitting.

But even as congestion-easing projects are being delayed, Los Angeles residents should not lose sight of what they are getting in return--the peace of mind that highway bridges will not collapse in a major temblor, Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) said.

“Los Angeles is at much greater risk because of a lack of seismic retrofit than the expansion of road projects,” he said. “Having to make the choice, I think seismic retrofit is much more important than new roads. We ought to make the roads that we have safe.”

The funding tug of war between roads and earthquake retrofitting was precipitated by the rejection of Proposition 1A in the June primary. The defeated bond measure earmarked $1 billion for seismic strengthening of bridges. As a result of its rejection, all bridge retrofitting costs will have to be absorbed by the transportation program, which is already facing funding shortages because of a slump in gasoline tax revenues and voter rejection of an earlier rail bond issue.

In fact, last January, even before the Northridge earthquake made seismic retrofitting a high-profile issue, Caltrans Director James van Loben Sels confided to a legislative workshop that insufficient revenues would send the state’s transportation program “off the cliff” in 1995.

“Because of the June 7 defeat of Proposition 1A . . . the voters shoved the program over the precipice and into a free fall about six months sooner than expected,” Arthur Bauer, executive director of Californians for Better Transportation, wrote his members in the group’s latest newsletter.

Late last week, state transportation officials determined that the second phase of their retrofitting program will involve the strengthening of an additional 1,364 overpasses at a cost of $1.05 billion. They have already identified 1,039 other bridges that need strengthening in the first phase of the program, which is funded.

The vulnerable projects will be those, like the Foothill Freeway extension and the widening of a 35.9-mile stretch of the Antelope Valley Freeway, that are not scheduled for construction until after 1994.

Rail projects are less threatened because, in most cases, they do not have to share scarce gasoline tax dollars with the seismic program; much of their financing is from bond issues or specially earmarked federal funds.

The catch there is that a $1-billion rail bond scheduled to go on the ballot in November is considered to have little chance of passing, given the fiscally conservative mood of the voters. Some officials, including Katz, are pushing to keep the measure off the ballot rather than face what they predict is certain defeat.

Without that bond issue, the state’s transportation funding shortage would climb to about $3 billion, and financing would become less certain for projects such as the Pasadena light rail line and the San Fernando Valley’s east-west line.

“If we don’t have a bond issue or some other way to fund those (rail) projects, they could be impacted (by the crisis),” said Linda Bohlinger, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s deputy executive officer for capital planning. She said one hopeful sign that these projects may have a better chance of keeping on track than the road projects is that both Katz and Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), chairman of the state Senate Transportation Committee, are urging the Wilson Administration not to delay any mass transit projects.

“The rationale for leaving rail out of the freeze is that rail is the one thing that worked well both in the Loma Prieta and the Northridge earthquakes,” said Katz.

Caltrans officials acknowledge that road projects are the ones most likely to be postponed, but they do not yet know how many. What they do know is that delays are likely to affect most large projects scheduled for the latter half of the decade.

“At all those (places) where Angelenos spend hours in congestion, they’re going to have to grin and bear it, because in all likelihood the state’s not going to have the resources to go ahead and push those projects through on a timely schedule,” said Jim Drago, Caltrans press secretary.

He said an exception will be made for highway safety projects that, like seismic projects, will get top priority for funding. But he said these are usually small, low-cost jobs that involve minor construction to straighten out a dangerous curve or install a stoplight at a busy intersection.

Drago said one of the knotty decisions facing officials will be what to do with mammoth projects that are being done in stages over many years.

Take the case of the Santa Ana Freeway widening, an ambitious, decade-long project that ultimately will double the number of lanes from southern Orange County to the Los Angeles County line. About a third of the project is completed, another third is under way and the final phase is set to begin soon.

The final segment calls for the replacement of several bridges. If the project is delayed, the bridges would have to be earthquake retrofitted only to be torn down in a few years when the project is started up again. “On all these projects, we’re going to have to weigh what makes the most sense from an engineering and financial view,” Drago said.

Stuck in Traffic

Here are the Los Angeles County road projects that could face delays because of a financial crisis in the state’s transportation program:

* The six-mile extension of the Foothill Freeway from its terminus at Foothill Boulevard in La Verne to the San Bernardino County line. The $274-million project has been the highest-priority freeway project in Los Angeles County for years because it would relieve a critical bottleneck in the fast-growing northeast sector of the county. Plans for the extension call for the construction of four lanes--including a car-pool lane--in each direction.

* The construction of a San Diego Freeway interchange at Arbor Vitae Street in Inglewood, a project first requested by the Los Angeles Department of Airports in 1976. The $24-million project would provide access to Los Angeles International Airport from the San Diego Freeway as well as the Century Freeway.

* The widening of a 35.9-mile stretch of the Antelope Valley Freeway from the Golden State Freeway in Santa Clarita to the Avenue P-8 overcrossing in Palmdale. The $134-million project, expected to take 10 years to complete, would add a car-pool lane in each direction.

* The addition of car-pool lanes in both directions on a 7.6-mile section of the San Diego Freeway from the Orange County line to the Long Beach Freeway in Long Beach. The $37-million project is a key element in local plans for a major high-occupancy-vehicle system designed to relieve congestion on Los Angeles County freeways.

* The widening and rehabilitation of Baseline Road in the northeast part of the county, making it a continuous four-lane highway from Foothill Boulevard in La Verne to the San Bernardino County line. Costing $11 million, the 5.3-mile project is to be completed in four segments.