710 Freeway Safety Work Put on Hold

California’s financial problems have stalled indefinitely a long-awaited $400-million plan to construct new barriers and shoulders along the Long Beach Freeway, sparking fresh concerns about safety on the truck-clogged route.

The project would improve safety on most of the outmoded 24-mile freeway, including the area where six people recently died in a big-rig crash. Most of the freeway’s medians and shoulders are narrower than state standards, and old wood-and-metal median barriers have not been replaced with the concrete barriers recommended for congested roadways with narrow medians, state Department of Transportation officials said.

News of the delay accompanies growing public worries about safety on the freeway, spurred by the Oct. 9 accident in which a truck traveling north during morning rush hour swerved and crashed through a wood-and-metal median in East Los Angeles.

The truck crushed a southbound Mercedes-Benz, killing two people inside and four in the truck, in what the California Highway Patrol called one of the worst accidents ever on a freeway known as among the worst in the region.

The postponed road improvements had been due for completion by 2007. Caltrans still hopes to obtain $18 million to replace eight miles of wood-and-metal barriers from the San Diego Freeway to just north of the Santa Ana Freeway. Construction could occur in late 2006 if money can be found.

For now, no one can say exactly when safety will be improved on the Long Beach Freeway, which is carrying an ever-increasing load of cargo from overseas.

Caltrans already faces at least two wrongful death lawsuits from survivors of people killed in truck accidents on the Long Beach Freeway. The survivors say that the state should have replaced the wood-and-metal barriers decades ago.

One case has been brought by the family of Antonio Esquivias, who was killed on Nov. 15, 2001, when a truck plowed through a barrier just north of Firestone Boulevard, ramming his car and several others.

A second case was brought by the family of Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Jeffrey Marckese, who was killed on Jan. 17, 2002, when a driver lost control of his truck and barreled through a median near Bandini Boulevard in Bell.

Caltrans officials declined to comment on the suits.

Attorneys for both families on Friday decried the condition of the freeway.

“If you know you have a lot of truck traffic, and you have this little wooden-and-metal deflector barrier, you know that it’s just a matter of time until you have an accident that’s going to be catastrophic,” said Geoffrey S. Wells, attorney for the Marckese family.

Traffic experts caution that even steel-reinforced concrete barriers may not deflect a fast-moving, 80,000-pound 18-wheeler, and a Caltrans spokeswoman said that both types of barriers are built to the same standards.

The Oct. 9 accident occurred along a section of the freeway where the median is 12 feet wide, or 6 feet on either side of the barrier, Caltrans officials said. Most of the freeway has 16-foot medians.

State standards for such highways call for 22-foot medians. And while those standards call for 10-foot-wide shoulders, most of the freeway has shoulders only 8 feet wide, Caltrans officials said.

One of the oldest freeways in the Los Angeles area, the Long Beach Freeway opened in the 1950s as a car commuting route and met state standards at the time. But as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have grown in the last decade, the road has turned into the single busiest connector between the ports and inland highways, railroads, warehouses and stores. It carries 15% of the nation’s seaborne cargo volume, or 47,000 trucks each day, a number projected to double or even triple in the coming years.

Although traffic has grown, the freeway has not. Caltrans says it tries to replace wood-and-metal median barriers with concrete on freeways with heavy truck traffic and medians narrower than 36 feet. It has installed concrete barriers in most urban areas where needed, but most of the Long Beach Freeway still uses the old-style barriers.

“As freeways age, we need to look at ways to make them safer,” said Stephen Finnegan, transportation policy manager for the Automobile Club of Southern California. “If adequate resources were available and priority given to these types of projects, we’d have less roadway that does not meet safety and design standards.”

Some residents along the freeway note that it runs through some of Los Angeles County’s poorest neighborhoods, areas that lack the political clout to demand more frequent road improvements.

The $400-million project would have upgraded the freeway from Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach north to the Santa Monica Freeway, adding new barriers, widening shoulders, adding ramp metering and widening bridges.

The first $19.6-million segment north to the San Diego Freeway is being finished, but no money remains for the rest of the project, Caltrans spokeswoman Deborah Harris wrote in a series of e-mails last week.

The remaining work was programmed but not funded, Harris wrote. “We thought there would be no problem with securing funding,” she said.

Funding was secured for a different, smaller project, an $8.6-million effort to replace the median barrier on the southern end of the freeway between Ocean Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. That project is set for spring 2005.

But finding $400 million for the larger project remains in doubt. The project is “an early casualty of the condition of the state highway account,” said Dennis Trujillo, a Caltrans spokesman in Sacramento.

“What we have here is a situation where economic conditions -- fewer federal revenues coming into the state as well as the ebb and flow of the state’s excise tax -- have created a shortfall in dedicated transportation funding,” he said.

California would benefit greatly if the current reauthorization of the federal transportation program in Washington would yield an aggressive program to help states fund transportation needs, he said.

Some officials reacted with surprise and concern Friday to news that the project is on hold.

“If these upgrades are not done, then the 710 freeway will only become a more dangerous freeway for trucks and normal commuters to travel on,” said Carl Kemp, manager of government affairs and public information for the city of Long Beach.

Assemblyman Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), who has long criticized heavy diesel truck emissions on the freeway, said the budget problems are one more sign of how officials must rally to improve conditions along a highway overwhelmed with moving global trade.

“Safety problems are looming, along with air pollution and traffic congestion, and we have a perfect storm,” Lowenthal said. “Any one of those issues is monumental.”

Some saw the $400-million project as a “Band-Aid” solution that would hold until the entire freeway corridor is rebuilt, an effort expected to cost more than $6 billion and take 12 or more years.

Local officials put that effort on hold last spring after area residents protested that widening portions of the freeway would destroy hundreds of homes and increase diesel pollution from trucks.

Now, officials must decide how to improve safety without concrete and asphalt.

Some have called on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to shift more operations to nights and weekends, reducing the number of trucks competing with cars during the day.

Lowenthal noted the concerns of many area residents that the Alameda Corridor -- a rail corridor built to move cargo from the ports to inland rail yards -- is carrying less cargo than anticipated.

“I’m still shocked that we have infrastructure like the Alameda Corridor being used to one-third its capacity.” In the end, he said, the solution may be to get trucks off the freeway altogether.

Richard Powers, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, said a panel of local, state and port officials will meet Oct. 29 to discuss short-term ways to improve safety on the Long Beach Freeway. The meeting will be at 6:30 p.m. at Progress Park in Paramount.