One could actually skip this long L.A. Weekly story and read just the headline. It says it all. Adam Gropman, 1.1 Billion and Five Years Later, the 405 Congestion Relief Project Is a Fail, LA Times on line, 3/4/15, click on http://www.laweekly.com/news/11-billion-and-five-years-later-the-405-congestion-relief-project-is-a-fail-5415772 But if you have an interest in the misadventures of public projects — or “public improvements” as their creators like to put it, click away and do read it. The L.A. Times evidently thought it’s important because it reprinted the story on line under its own masthead.
The 405, for you flatlanders, is the San Diego Freeway, and its pertinent part is the one that crosses the Santa Monica Mountains north-south, provides access to the Getty Center museum, connects the San Fernando Valley with the West Side of Los Angeles, and is the primary route to the LAX Airport from the north. It has always been a heavily travelled freeway, but eventually it got pretty bad, so a huge project was undertaken to fix it. Did it? Actually, no. Quoth the L.A. Weekly:
“This past May the project known as the I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvement Project came to official completion, with resulting new on-ramps and off-ramps, bridges and a northbound 405 carpool lane stretching 10 miles between the 10 and 101 Freeways.
“The four-turned–five-year, $1.1 billion project became a long-running nightmare of sudden ramp closures, poorly advertised by Metro and made all the worse by baffling detours that led drivers into the unfamiliar Bel Air Hills and Sherman Oaks hills, dead ends and unlit canyons.
As Metro’s closures and delays reached their height in 2013, L.A. Weekly encountered stranded motorists merely by following Metro’s official detours — which in many cases were roads to nowhere. And it isn’t over in the Valley or on the Westside. Sudden ramp and lane closures are still hitting motorists at Getty Center, Valley Vista, Skirball Center and elsewhere as work on the officially completed project grinds on.”