Mess on the 405

The northbound lanes of the 405 are closed in Sherman Oaks after a crane overturned on the freeway, trapping a crain operator. The closure occurred just after 1 p.m.

Update: Channel 9 says the operator has been rescued. The crane from a construction site off the freeway landed on two northbound lanes but didn't hit any cars. The freeway was reopened around 4:30.

Comments

[Wright Concept]

With more than 300,000 cars cramming through the Sepulveda Pass daily, what should be looked at is building a rail corridor as an alternative to the 405 through the pass to get between the isolated islands of the San Fernando Valley, the Westside and Los Angeles International Airport.

Imagine the Purple Line — once it reaches Westwood, it turns north through the pass, reaching Sherman Oaks from UCLA in a few minutes. Then this route continues north through the Valley and south down to LAX. Imagine from the Valley getting to activities on the Westside within 12 minutes.

Imagine the political consensus to get the subway to the ocean. Imagine the ability of residents to have an alternative to get around quickly without their cars. Imagine the ability to unite these balkanized regions. Imagine the high ridership removing those single occupant drivers off the 405 temporarily relieving congestion.

[weasey]

I don't normally drive to downtown but a few weeks ago I had to do so for work for approx. ten days. There were no accidents on freeways to cause my commute to be over 2 hours each way from Thousand Oaks. What is wrong is poor freeway design. Merges which are not anticpated, signs that are not clear or are posted too close to the merge, Construction that is never fi nished. Friday I was one of the lucky ones to sit in four hours of traffic due to the crane accident on 405. That busy intersection even with the new Ventura Blvd exit is going to continue to be a death zone, e.g. the Brandy incident. . The exit to the 101 East and 101 West is downright confusing and causes back up on 405 on a good day for 20 minutes.
We can send man to the moon but we can't figure out L.A. freeways.

[Mark Jolles]

Readers Rep at latimes.com wrote:

Dear Mr. Jolles,

Thanks for your further thoughts and those particulars, though I thought I should mention that it seems to me that I've read stories in The Times that have discussed transportation in at least some of the terms you've mentioned (those whose jargon I can readily decipher, anyway).

Again, I don't know if you are a regular reader of The Times--you haven't said--but I'd be interested to know more particulars about how you came to feel that over the years the Times has not been informing the public about transportation and addressing those angles (in other words, particular articles of the past year or so that you've seen as falling short), so that I can let editors know of them.

Thank you again.
Kent Zelas

=========================================================

Kent Zelas
Asst. Readers Rep
Los Angeles Times

February 2, 2007

Mr. Zelas:

I thought last night about your last e-mail and I think the newspaper may be missing the whole point. Have your editors ask this question and then seek the answer and you have your story.

With this region historically spending tens of billions of dollars on interstates, road widening, and intersection improvements, while ripping up miles of neighborhoods to do it, and imposing decades of bad air on our children,

and all resulting in horrific gridlock, an ineffective transit system, miles and miles of blighted urban areas, a housing shortage, a stalled tax base, numerous redevelopment zones, not enough money for police to address gang violence, nor funds to trim trees and fix sidewalks,

all with formidable public resistance to development and economic growth in the most viable areas of the region,

How did we, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, get to this point? And how do we get past it?

Once your newspaper begins to ask those two questions, and seeks well researched answers, as they did with the King-Drew Hospital story, (and of course still reports about those always titillating cat fights between neighborhoods, NIMBYs, and greedy developers) I will have more respect for the LA Times coverage about transportation. Until then, I rate your coverage as bad as the traffic.

Good luck, this is not as hard a task as you think, if someone just does some homework,

Mark Jolles

[g. Bonner]

Well..my son and I had just crossed the Mulholland offramp and started downhill (north) on the 405 today when everything went down.
We got stuck for almost 3 hours before we finally were able to exit the Ventura Blvd. Offramp in a crush of vehicles.

What I learned today. LA ,apparently, has no real plan for a disaster that strands so many motorists. I wondered during this.."what if this was a terrorist act with some form of 'bio chemical; released.

Thousands of us would just be sitting in the open air with no place to go. All the while, I looked at the emptineess of the south bound 405 lanes and thought..gee; I wonder if there could be 'emergency crews' in place for an event as this. They could move in really quickly and open up various places of the freeway barriers and usher cars off the freeway in a faster way. Heck, why aren't there any emergency roads to be used in such an event?? Why isn't there any plan like that?

When I finally got my son to his moms and returned to work in Beverly Hills almost an hour and a half late..I saw the impact of that one closeure on all of northbound traffic from the Westside> Wow!! What a disaster...tens of thousands of man/woman hours lost/ tens of thousands of gallons of wasted fuel...

This was just a crane falling..hmm..what if it was worse..??

I thought,also, "Cops love to stand around in groups of 6-10 and jaw at one another and do nothing to ease the situation." I saw several groups on my way off at Ventura..heck these able bodied officers could be used to help set up exits if Cal trans could have removed sections of freeway barriers so that the traffic coud begin U-turning and heading south and using all those wasted hours for more productive things.

Any La politicians out there with any kind of thoughts on this?? How about a little help from City Hall. Today was an example of potential nightmares just waitng to happen on a more frequent basis.

[Mad Max]

This traffic is what we all deserve. Makeup, phones, PDA's, and mirrors. Vanity created this mess, so now we all have plenty of time to not drive in our cars. Which is what we wanted, right?

[TK]

One traffic solution would be to enforce our borders and crack down on illegal immigration.
There are 2-3 million people in this city illegally.
I bet that would help out with traffic in this town quite a bit if something was done about that.

[steve]

Per my google news searches each day there are at least 5 freeway closures per week in So. Calif. on average. This never used to happen 20 years ago. It is now out of control and it is happening as there are no checks on silly law enforcement people that could care less about people (or God forbid "the Children"!) dying in their cars as they sit there for 3-12hrs. We are closing down freeways every time someone gets a runny nose. Get real.