Paypal co-founder offers money for I-405 widening

[Lyon Wonder]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-elon-musk-405-freeway-20130425,0,7423915.story

By Martha Groves

April 25, 2013, 9:15 a.m.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has already spent $50,000 trying to make the 405 Freeway better — and he's willing to pay even more.

Musk said he is open to pay the cost of adding workers to the widening project "as a contribution to the city and my own happiness. If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I've super had it."

In July, the PayPal and Tesla Motors co-founder met David Murphy, a Westwood resident who heads Angelenos Against Gridlock, a group seeking to hasten the development and repair of infrastructure in California and nationwide. The two shared traffic frustrations, and Musk contributed $50,000 toward an effort to hurry the 405 project along. So far they have little to show for it.

Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.

"The 405 ... varies from bad to horrendous," he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview. "It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this.... I don't know why they aren't marching in the streets."

The massive project to widen the 405 Freeway is not only causing traffic nightmares for motorists like Musk but has also been plagued by cost overruns and delays.

Transportation officials say the project is now slated to take at least a year longer than first anticipated and cost about $100 million more than the originally budgeted $1 billion.

The companies handling the work won kudos when they were able to reopen the freeway ahead of schedule during the so-called Carmageddon events in 2011 and 2012. But that masked a larger problem for the main contractor, Kiewit, and the subcontractors.

[agentsteel53]

navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.

if he elects to not use a standard helicopter, citing environmental concerns, then he needs to invent himself an alternate-fuels helicopter.  time is money.

[kkt]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-elon-musk-405-freeway-20130425,0,7423915.story

Musk sounds like an awful spoiled brat.  Waah, waah, waah, I'm so wealthy and yet I still have to sit in stop & go traffic!  Can't I pay more and get out of it??

Why doesn't he buy a house next to where he works?

[cpzilliacus]

Build a second deck (and maybe a tunnel under the Sepulveda Pass) with priced lanes and a design speed (and posted limit) of 75 MPH.

There will be plenty of paying customers.

[agentsteel53]

make it 90mph and I'm in.

[triplemultiplex]

"The 405 ... varies from bad to horrendous," he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview. "It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this.... I don't know why they aren't marching in the streets."

Marching would get them where they're going faster than The 405.

[cpzilliacus]

make it 90mph and I'm in.

I suggested 75 because I don't think my pickup truck wants to go as fast as 90 MPH (but it does 75 very happily).

Of course, the truck happens to be parked about 2,650 road miles from the Sepulveda Pass as I write this.

[sdmichael]

Or how about get a motorcycle? Mind you... the last couple times I've taken the 405 over Sepulveda Pass, during afternoon peak times, on a Friday, I didn't hit any traffic until around Wilshire Blvd. I would have sailed through even with a car.

[Tarkus]

Musk sounds like an awful spoiled brat.  Waah, waah, waah, I'm so wealthy and yet I still have to sit in stop & go traffic!  Can't I pay more and get out of it??

Here's how I see it--the guy's got a boatload of money, and he's willing to donate it to the betterment of LA's transportation grid.  It's just like donating to a charity, except his charity of choice happens to be CalTrans.  If I had a boatload of money like that, I'd certainly plunk down some funds, to fix up some roads.  That said, $50,000 is chump change, in terms of the cost of that project, and in terms of what Musk is worth ($2.7 billion).