Upgrade of Freeway Exchange Discussed

A new state Assembly committee on relieving traffic congestion made its first effort at the San Fernando Valley’s most notorious highway headache Thursday.

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

Assemblyman Wally Knox (D-Los Angeles), 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, Knox spelled out the challenge:

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

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 proposal would add one lane to the connector between the northbound San Diego Freeway and the eastbound Ventura Freeway and another lane on the east side of the San Diego Freeway, between Mulholland Drive and Ventura Boulevard.

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

Committee member Robert Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) and Knox pushed for even faster work.

“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.”