![]() While Taylor is optimistic that the weekend won’t see traffic jams in every corner of the city (as has been predicted), he notes the benefit of Caltrans being “chicken little” about the closure. And it’s just not possible to redirect all those cars onto other roads without causing almost certain gridlock. The span of the 405 carries at least 280,000 cars on an average weekend day. “In San Francisco, replace the mountains with the bay, or in New York, the Hudson River,” Taylor says. Putting a stretch of roadway through the area is costly and limited by geography. Numerous other canyon roads cut through the mountains, too – but they’re slow, winding, and congested even on a normal day when the 405 is open, UCLA Urban Planning Professor Brian D. But the four-lane road is no match for the capacity of the ten-lane freeway. In fact, Sepulveda Boulevard snakes along mountains below the freeway, mirroring the 405’s route. While it’s tricky to carve roads through the area’s hills and valleys, a quick glance at a map proves that side roads indeed exist. And it’s a crucial piece of roadway: the freeway handles as many as 374,000 cars on the average day. The part of the 405 that’s now impassable stretches precariously across the Sepulveda Pass, a particularly mountainous and geographically challenging area, the the only main road to cut north and south through the Santa Monica Mountains. ( PHOTOS: Los Angeles Braces for Carmageddon) How did one stretch of road get to be so important? The giant warning signs telling drivers in no hazy terms to “EXPECT BIG DELAYS” this weekend span from Bakersfield to San Diego. is expected to cause gear-grinding grief throughout the city, even on a weekend in July. The two-day closure of the essential link through the L.A. The stretch of precious freeway is shut down from midnight Friday until 5 a.m. What’s the problem, you might ask? Well, the span of the 405 is one of the city’s most crucial freeways, connecting the San Fernando Valley with Los Angeles’ Westside. Here’s the clincher: the closure is scheduled to last a mere 53 hours. residents are staring into the face of sure gridlock as the city shutters a 10-mile stretch of the 405 freeway starting Friday at midnight. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Car-loving Angelenos will try to take Doc Brown’s wisdom to heart – and practice – this weekend. ![]() Michael Baker prepared detailed construction staging and traffic handling plans to maintain the existing number of lanes, minimize ramp/freeway closures, and maximize construction phasing of all improvements to minimize costs.Follow all the commotion, you’d think it was the only road in town. The high traffic volume of the I-5/I-405 freeway interchange and complexity of construction required an in-depth analysis of construction and traffic handling conditions. This prevented truck traffic from being trapped in the interior lanes of the I-5 as the I-405 merged and diverged from the right-hand lanes in the northbound and southbound directions. As a result, approximately 400,000 vehicles are now able to use the Y daily, up from its former 300,000-car capacity.Īnother key feature of this major system interchange modification was the inclusion of signing for a truck by-pass designation for the collector-distributor roads along I-5. At its widest point, the I-5/I-405 interchange was expanded to 26 lanes, making it the widest interchange in the county and possibly the United States. The final design included two new carpool lanes in each direction on the freeway mainline with an HOV direct connector structure enabling motorists to easily connect between I-5 and I-405 without weaving across mainline freeway traffic five new bridges a system of collector-distributor roadways that allowed for the construction of a new interchange at Bake Parkway and modifications to four separate local interchanges. As the prime consultant, Michael Baker prepared the Project Report and Plans, Specifications and Estimates (PS&E) for an innovative design at the interchange to reduce congestion and accommodate more motorists at the busiest freeway-to-freeway connection in Southern California. Considered the worst bottleneck in Orange County, the El Toro “Y,” where Interstates 405 and 5 merge, was in need of a major revamp in the early 1990s. ![]()
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