Knox Urges Faster Work on Freeway Interchange

Combining the catharsis of a radio talk show with the nuts and bolts of a policy seminar, a new state Assembly committee on relieving traffic congestion took its first stab at the San Fernando Valley’s most notorious highway headache Thursday.

The lawmakers met--appropriately enough, at the height of the afternoon rush hour--in the shadow of the state’s fourth-busiest interchange, the tangled junction of the San Diego and Ventura freeways.

Assemblyman Wally Knox, the committee’s chairman, has named the intersection the panel’s first priority.

As several thousand of the 550,000 vehicles the exchange carries daily crawled by outside the Radisson Valley Center Hotel, the Los Angeles Democrat spelled out the challenge at hand:

Above and beyond a newly accelerated timeline for building two more lanes at the intersection, Knox said, “Can we still do it better?”

To dramatize the plight of frustrated motorists, Knox--who represents parts of Encino, Sherman Oaks and Studio City--invited the public to tell “horror stories” about their miserable commutes and missed appointments. His staff even set up a telephone hotline to take calls from people unable to attend the hearing.

“I’ve had so much trouble at that intersection that I finally decided not to try to drive through it, even if it takes longer,” one caller said.

“It’s just a total mess,” another complained, describing motorists’ perilous efforts to cut across several lanes to exit the freeway. “There’s not any intersection that I know of in Los Angeles that’s as dangerous as this one.”

On the table is an estimated $13.1 million proposal that so far has the support of all relevant parties in the highway construction bureaucracy. The upgrade would add one lane to the connector between the northbound San Diego Freeway and the eastbound Ventura Freeway and another auxiliary lane to the northbound San Diego Freeway between Mulholland Drive and Ventura Boulevard.

Robert Sassaman, the chief deputy director of the regional Caltrans office, said that the freeway interchange would be improved and open to drivers by late 2002, rather than early 2004, as the initial timeline projected.

Committee member Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) and Knox pushed for even faster work, asking whether Caltrans could work overtime, use larger crews, or pile various stages of planning and construction atop each other to finish the project “by the time my third-grader is in fifth grade instead of junior high school,” as Hertzberg put it.

“All the way along there have been good reasons why something could not be done,” Knox told Caltrans officials. “But if you put enough will into the effort, things will get done.”

The MTA recently pledged to fund 20% of the project. David Fleming, a Valley attorney who sits on the state panel that will decide whether to pay the remaining costs, has repeatedly promised that the money was as good as guaranteed.

He told committee members Thursday that the funding remained on track and urged them to focus on compressing the four- to seven-year time frame that state freeway projects typically consume.

“This is an emergency-room situation,” Fleming said, calling for improvements “at warp speed rather than geologic speed.”

California’s newly elected Gov. Gray Davis has also urged faster work on road projects statewide--spurring Caltrans to announce last month that it would accelerate environmental and design work at the interchange by more than a year, bringing the date for groundbreaking to early 2001.

Saying that only sustained public pressure will speed the upgrade, Knox has continued to push for even faster work. Once this relatively modest fix is complete, Knox has vowed to pursue additional improvements.

As chair of the Select Committee on Transportation Congestion Relief, Knox promised to use the panel “to dog” the MTA and Caltrans toward ever-quicker solutions at the traffic-snarled interchange. Committee members Charlene Zettel (R-Poway) and Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), who was recently appointed chairman of the Transportation Committee, also attended the hearing.

With the population of the Valley expected to swell 39% between 1990 and 2020, according to one estimate by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, committee members made clear that traffic congestion will require long-term and immediate relief. Torlakson said he hoped the San Diego/Ventura freeway effort would offer a model for transportation projects statewide.

Several residents and environmentalists also testified, expressing concern that with massive new housing developments ahead, such as Newhall Ranch on the Ventura County border, any freeway upgrade will be but a temporary solution.

“It’s like dealing with obesity by loosening your belt,” argued Gloria Ohland of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national nonprofit group. “It works for a while, but ultimately it doesn’t work. . . . There’s so much pent-up demand, so many people with so many cars and so many places to go, that every time you make it easier for people to drive, they will drive.”