Clearer Road Ahead : Carpool Lane Construction Continues on Valley Freeways

It may be slow going these days on San Fernando Valley freeways, but the road ahead looks at least a little clearer as a number of construction projects to add carpool lanes wrap up in the weeks and months to come.

By the end of the year, three more stretches of Valley freeways will join the Ventura Freeway through Burbank as boasting carpool lanes. First to open will be the Hollywood Freeway between the Golden State Freeway and Moorpark Street. Caltrans hopes to add the finishing touches over the next two weeks.

Although construction of the lanes is finished, recent inclement weather has held up opening of the 6.1-mile stretch because the adhesive stripes that mark the new lanes must be applied in drier, warmer weather, Caltrans spokesman Pat Reid said.

“We hope the weather cooperates,” she said.

In the meantime, construction crews and lane closures are slowing traffic on the other two freeways being outfitted with new lanes: the Simi Valley and San Diego freeways. Reid said 10 miles of lanes on the San Diego Freeway between the Golden State Freeway and Ventura Boulevard are scheduled to open in September after a two-year, $15-million project.

Work on the Simi Valley Freeway between the Golden State Freeway and the Ventura County line, however, will take slightly longer. Although lanes between Balboa Boulevard and De Soto Avenue are scheduled to open in September, the rest of the 11.4-mile project will not carry cars until December.

East of Balboa Boulevard, crews have torn up old dividing walls and begun to tear up edges of the roadway to build a new roadbed for the additional lanes. The work is further along west of Balboa Boulevard, but cracks in some of the concrete road panels have forced crews to redo some of the work.

“They are having some problems with the concrete, and have been doing sealing with wax and epoxy,” Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritilli said. “If this doesn’t solve the problem, they may have to pull up between 50 to 100 concrete panels.”

Friday, crews cut the panels, measuring 12 feet by 15 feet, and will remove them with a crane in a few days, Reid said, adding that the extra work is not expected to delay the opening or hike the cost of the $22-million project.

Project manager George Butorovich, who oversees the construction contract for San Diego-based FCI Constructors, said the cracks are a fairly normal part of any large project. “We always anticipate there are going to be some problems,” he said. “This is a very, very small percentage of the total, less than one-half of 1%.”

Nonetheless, Caltrans engineers want to study the concrete and the nearby geology to determine why the concrete cracked. “We’ve been testing it, but we don’t know what the problem is,” Tiritilli said.

The carpool lanes are part of a countywide program to increase the capacity of overcrowded freeways. By adding lanes that exclude solo drivers, transportation engineers say overall freeway traffic improves.

Carpool lanes on some freeways carry as much as 40% of the total commuters, and some carpool commuters on heavily traveled routes cut their morning commute by more than 20 minutes, according to Caltrans statistics.

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this story.