To all - NYT article about plans for the end of the 710 freeway in Los Angeles.
(This has nothing to do with Gregg).
(Note (near the end of the article) estimated cost of $311 million per mile (!))
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October 9, 1999
In California, a Fight Over a Road's Final Miles
By TODD S. PURDUM
ALHAMBRA, Calif. -- It comes barreling up from the harbor at Long
Beach, six lanes across and filled with cars, then stops short at a big
berm of earth that looks like an abandoned jump for Evel Knievel.
For 34 years, the 710 freeway has gone just so far and no farther, and traffic
has poured off it onto the streets of this San Gabriel Valley suburb in a
singular brand of Southern California frustration: a daily bottleneck of
rush-hour smog, congestion and stalemate.
For much of that time, plans to extend the road's northern end to tie in with
the area's freeway web have been blocked by South Pasadena, the city to the
north, whose residents fear that the freeway's final 4.5 miles would despoil
historic neighborhoods of Craftsman-style houses, increase traffic and ruin
life in one of the oldest and most picturesque enclaves in greater Los Angeles.
Last year the Federal Government gave final approval to build the $1.4 billion
link. But this summer, opponents won an injunction in Federal District Court
against further construction or land acquisition, pending a review.
So Alhambra, which wants the road to ease gridlock and foster growth,
declared guerrilla war, at first blocking some intersections entirely, then
drastically re-timing lights to slow traffic.
At one level, the fight over this freeway is a timeless, parochial conflict.
But in a broader sense, the battle of Interstate 710 is an example of the
biggest question bedeviling a region that is again expanding explosively after a
deep recession: how to accommodate growth in Southern California without
destroying the very quality of life that drew masses of Americans here.
When the road was planned, the consensus was more freeways. But this
stalemate has lasted so long that the ground has shifted beneath it, and a
political establishment that once supported it is now highly skeptical, if not
outright opposed. And whether the new road winds up being built or not, the
controversy may be the last of its kind here, because there is simply no more
room.
"The real question is, is L.A. going to grow up and face the future," said Alan
Maltun, a public relations consultant in South Pasadena and a longtime
freeway opponent. "History's shown that we've continued to delude ourselves
up to now and everybody's chasing a life style that was evolved in the 40's
and 50's that the transportation infrastructure can no longer support, given
the population.
"The real question is whether public leadership is going to finally draw the
line and say, 'Look, as much as we have screwed up mass transportation
here, we can't abandon that goal.' There's just no way you can build enough
freeways," Maltun said.
The California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, says the
freeway extension would take 100,000 vehicles a day from city streets,
prevent 610 accidents and 7 deaths a year, reduce air pollution, conserve fuel
and create jobs, as a final north-south link between two major east-west
roads, the San Bernardino Freeway, Interstate 10, and the Foothill Freeway,
Interstate 210. Opponents sharply dispute many of those assertions.
Both sides agree that the road would be filled to capacity at rush hour the
minute it opens, and would probably let commuters travel no more than 1.5
miles per hour faster at rush hour.
At a time that some cities, from San Francisco to Boston, have decided to
tear down or bury old freeways, not build new ones, transportation experts
here say that just because the 710 has been on the drawing board for
decades, supported by politically influential construction unions and
bureaucratic inertia, that is no reason to build it if it is no longer practical.
"Once upon a time, the trend was to sacrifice communities in the name of
circulation," said Gloria Ohland, Southern California project manager for the
Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national coalition of organizations
dedicated to transportation policies that protect the environment and promote
livable communities. It favors experimenting with alternatives such as wide
streets, long light cycles, bus and bike lanes.
"We have sacrificed so much of this city to highways and moving cars, and
there aren't that many great neighborhoods left, and the ones that are should
be preserved," Ms. Ohland said.
Officials in Alhambra do not dispute that goal. They just talk about how the
lack of a freeway hurts their own town.
They complain that the intersection of Valley Boulevard, the east-west street
that leads off the existing freeway terminus, and Freemont Avenue, the
north-south street that leads up to Pasadena, is one of the 10 busiest
intersections in Los Angeles County, and say they are merely trying to
"modify, calm, regulate traffic to what it would be if the freeway were built,"
as the city's transportation analyst, Mike Holmes, put it.
"Basically, Freemont Avenue is the default 710 freeway," said
Holmes, whose engineers reduced the rush-hour green-light cycle on
eastbound Valley Boulevard at Freemont to 27 seconds, from 90, in July in an
effort to slow the flow.
"We get all these accidental tourists that are forced to come through
Alhambra because the freeway's not done. They don't want to come through.
They have to. South Pasadena talks about cutting their city in half, cutting
down trees. They never talk about the daily impacts on Alhambra."
But after initial howls of protest and half-hour backups this summer, many
commuters have apparently found alternative routes, Holmes said, and
conditions are better. Freeway opponents say that proves their point that the
new route is not badly needed.
Over the long years, transportation planners have made numerous
concessions to freeway opponents, agreeing to move or rebuild some historic
houses, ban trucks from the new section of road and abandon plans for an
interchange with the existing 110 Pasadena Freeway, the region's oldest and a
national prototype, opened in 1940. Such an interchange would have forced
demolition of even more houses than the nearly 1,000 that would still be
taken.
But planners consistently rejected an earlier South Pasadena proposal to route
the road along the city's western border with Los Angeles proper, and so it
would still slice South Pasadena, a city of 3.5 square miles and 24,000
people, almost precisely in half.
"It's a heck of a lot of money to be spent on something that's not needed,"
said Joanne Nuckols, an interior designer who has lived for 30 years about
two blocks from the proposed route. She has long been among the group of
local homeowners, many of them women, who have organized to fight the
road, which at a cost of some $311 million a mile would be among the most
expensive highways ever built.
"Things have actually been going quite well for us in court lately," Ms.
Nuckols said, "and my friend said: 'Oh my God, what will we do if we win?
We won't have an excuse not to clean house anymore.' "
In granting the injunction against further construction this summer, Judge
Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court, the son of the Federal judge
who presided over the last big freeway fight in Los Angeles, ruled that state
and Federal officials had failed to adequately consider less-disruptive surface
street alternatives, like improving traffic flow on adjoining streets, and that
the plaintiffs had "shown a probability of success on the merits" of that
claim.
The next status conference in the case is scheduled for February, and any
trial would be a year or two off. Opponents hope that will give them time to
build support for other longstanding transportation projects, like a
long-proposed light rail line from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena that
has been beleaguered by delays and disputes over financing.
A spokesman for Caltrans, Margie Tiritilli, noting that the freeway project
was still in court, said only that the agency "continues to meet" with the
affected cities and state and local officials. Part of the road would run
through Pasadena itself, and part through a gritty East Los Angeles
neighborhood called El Sereno, whose mostly poor and minority residents
have also objected to the project in a separate lawsuit.
But now most of those local officials -- a new generation not involved in the
original planning -- are cool to the project, or oppose it outright, including the
State Assembly Speaker, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, and the area's Republican
Congressman, Representative James E. Rogan, and his Democratic
challenger, State Senator Adam B. Schiff.
"Ultimately, it's got to be a political decision, and I think that bodes well for a
consensus resolution that is going to improve traffic in the corridor without a
freeway," said Antonio Rossmann, the lawyer for South Pasadena. "The fact
is, the politicians are out there ahead of the engineers and bureaucrats. You
can't build your way out of congestion. If you build it, they will come."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
