Advertisement

Lanes’ Debut a High Point for Carpoolers

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

As bright red taillights of cars stuck in traffic clogged the lanes below, carpoolers on an elevated portion of the Harbor Freeway began driving Wednesday on the first roadway built in Los Angeles over an existing freeway.

The landmark project--the closest thing Los Angeles has to a double-deck freeway--is expected to become a testing ground for a new concept in solving the region’s traffic problems.

But drivers who began using the highway in the sky, which is restricted to carpools and buses, were more interested in breaking free of gridlock--even for a few miles.

Advertisement

“It was great,” said Julie Allomong, a downtown worker who drove on the transitway Wednesday night. She made it home to Playa del Rey in 22 minutes, down from the 45 minutes traveling in regular traffic lanes the night before.

Allomong said she didn’t notice that she was traveling 50 feet above a busy freeway. “You don’t feel like you’re going up,” said the 38-year-old advertising coordinator for Transamerica Life Cos. Now, she said, she may sleep later before starting her commute.

Curtis Jones also got home faster Wednesday night on his drive from downtown to Gardena. “We got on there about 4:20, and 20 minutes later, I was in my driveway. And I was going 55 and above all the way. Usually, I’m not home until 5 or after.”

The opening of the $500-million transitway capped seven years of construction on one of the nation’s busiest roads.

“A new era in highway engineering has begun,” Dean Dunphy, secretary of the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, said at ceremonies Wednesday morning atop the elevated roadway.

“What you see today is a model for future freeway expansion in heavily populated areas,” Dunphy said. “Caltrans has looked up instead of out to solve urban congestion.”

Advertisement

C. Glenn Clinton, a district chief of operations for the Federal Highway Administration, was less philosophical. “Isn’t this wonderful,” he said.

Dunphy used a key to “unlock congestion” and open the transitway to its first car, a black Mercedes driven by the project engineer’s wife--accompanied, of course, by a carpool partner.

Former Gov. George Deukmejian, who as governor also attended the groundbreaking for the transitway in 1989, joked: “As I was coming onto one of the onramps, a man was standing with a sign, ‘Rent Me and Drive the Diamond Lane.’ ”

When traffic barriers were taken down shortly before noon, it took CHP Officer Kevin Pritchard less than an hour to issue the first $271 ticket to a solo motorist caught in the carpool lane. Overall, CHP officials said first-day operations ran smoothly.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus riders didn’t get to celebrate the new transitway.

An MTA spokeswoman said buses would not be carrying passengers on the transitway until August because drivers have not yet been trained on how to negotiate the new lanes. Bus drivers could not have trained earlier because of the construction, the spokeswoman said.

Advertisement

The elevated roadway, which stretches 2.6 miles, has drawn curious looks from passersby since construction began. Transportation planners have seen it as a way to get around the high land costs and political opposition involved in widening freeways in urban regions.

The project includes more than the elevated roadway. There are also 7 1/2 miles of additional pool lanes--two lanes in each direction much of the way--between the Coliseum and the Artesia Freeway. The lanes run at freeway level except between Slauson Avenue and the Coliseum, where the roadway rises to 50 feet above the regular traffic lanes. The transitway also is designed to accommodate a rail line, if a decision is ever made to build one.

Caltrans officials estimate that the transitway will save carpoolers an average 20 minutes in their commute time, but they could not say how it would affect solo commuters, who make up the majority of drivers during rush hour.

Eric Findon, assistant to the general manager at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and a carpooler from Hermosa Beach to downtown, predicted his commute will be reduced from 40 minutes to 25 minutes.

“It’s going to make a tremendous difference,” he said. “It will send the signal, ‘Hey, go find a carpool partner if you don’t have one.’ ”

Jones, a supervisor in the DWP print shop, was thrilled that the roadway was finally open.

Asked if he was nervous about driving on an elevated roadway in earthquake country, he said, “You have to bring that up? Yeah, that is something to think about.”

Advertisement

To ease such concerns, Caltrans engineers applied lessons learned after the collapse of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway in Oakland in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The elevated section is supported by thick Y-shaped columns built atop steel shafts extending 93 feet into the ground.

While the ceremony was being staged, cranes were working in the middle of the freeway less than a mile away, completing new on- and offramps at Adams Boulevard. Construction also continues on bus stops in the middle of the freeway. Work is expected to be completed early next year.

The transitway does not extend all the way to downtown because there was not enough money, but transportation officials are studying how to extend it and pay for it.

Advertisement