California SR 2 - Proposal to Remove Stub End of Freeway west of Interstate 5 LA

[andy3175]

Transforming the end of the 2 Freeway could be the beginning of a new L.A.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-freeway-essay-20151231-column.html

Around the country, cities are demolishing stretches of highway, turning them into parks or boulevards.

Los Angeles has an opportunity to do something even more dramatic: to close a piece of elevated freeway to traffic but keep it intact as a huge platform for new open space and housing.

In a single gesture, the city could produce significant parkland and a monument to the ambition that produced the Southern California highway network in the first place.

The stretch I have in mind is the stub end of the 2 Freeway as it bends south and west from Interstate 5 and dips into Silver Lake and Echo Park, two miles or so from downtown Los Angeles.

Is this a freeway? A glorified offramp? In fact, it's something of a hybrid, wide enough to match the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass but in practice a transitional and vastly overscaled road, slowing drivers as they leave the freeway and rejoin street traffic on Glendale Boulevard.

Though many of those motorists are too busy driving to notice, this stretch of the 2, about a mile long, also snakes through a remarkably beautiful natural landscape, a narrow valley with hills dotted with single-family houses on both sides.

Because we've been taught as Angelenos that every bit of freeway is not only desperately needed but also practically sacred, it's tempting to look at this extra bit of the 2 on the map and think that it needs to be extended to connect with the 101 a mile or so south. (That was the original plan; community opposition in the early 1960s kept the freeway from being lengthened, leaving us with the abbreviated spur we know today.) ...

Closed to traffic, the spur could be remade as an urban park at the stunning, nearly sublime scale of the freeway. It could be a bikeway (with remarkable views) connecting to paths along the nearby Los Angeles River. It could hold housing, schools, a giant urban farm or a large solar array. It could help capture and treat storm water.

In fact, it is large enough to be — and do — all of those things.

[oscar]

The guy who wrote this is the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. He acknowledges that traffic engineers will have to address little details like where the displaced traffic would go, which is an admission that he hasn't really thought through his proposal including how it might impact other neighborhoods.

I'm not familiar enough with the CA 2 freeway stub in question to form an opinion. But having this proposal come from an architecture critic is not a good start.

[noelbotevera]

To be honest, they had three choices. The decent option would be to give up. The worst was to plow through to build a mile of freeway. The best option is this, because now the freeway has a logical terminus at I-5 rather than...somewhere in Glendale that feels like a far cry from US 101.

[DTComposer]

Some issues with this article:

Traffic engineers would have to study the potential ripple effects on traffic in other parts of the city (just as they are now considering the effect of closing a section of the Terminal Island Freeway in Long Beach).

First, they're not closing that section of the TI Freeway, they're just downgrading it from a freeway to a boulevard. Second, that section has very little significance in the overall freeway network (AADT is about 11,000, compared to 61,000 for the section of CA-2 in question).

Instead of dividing Silver Lake from Echo Park, the elevated parkway (wide enough to dwarf the High Line) could reconnect the two neighborhoods.

If anything, the High Line offers not so much a model here as a cautionary tale. It has been so successful that it has produced a land rush along its length, creating a hyper-gentrified urban playground.

Silver Lake is already one of the most hyper-gentrified neighborhoods in L.A.

Also, as mentioned above, the traffic will have to go somewhere, and since I would guess most of the traffic currently using this section of freeway is local in nature (getting into/out of Silver Lake, Echo Park, Elysian Heights), it's not going to go onto other freeways - rather, it's going to end up on local arterials like Glendale Boulevard, Allesandro Street and Silver Lake Boulevard, which will actually lower the quality of life in those neighborhoods.

There are more than a few places where engineers overbuilt or overextended that network, leaving hulking pieces of infrastructure ready to be transformed.

They didn't overbuild or overextend; they got stopped before they could finish. Although I would not want to see the labyrinthine network some planners envisioned in the 1940s and '50s, since L.A. committed itself to car-centric, decentralized urban development, there are some corridors whose construction/completion would have made the traffic situation today not quite as horrific, IMO - this section of CA-2 is one of them, as is the I-710 link, the Slauson corridor, connecting I-105 to I-5, La Cienega, and CA-64 across the Valley.

Mind you, I wouldn't want to see most of those built now, as I wouldn't want a repeat of what happened when I-105 was finally built and was plowed through densely-populated, mainly low-income neighborhoods, displacing thousands of people.

[The Ghostbuster]

They should probably just leave it alone. Removing it may greatly increase congestion on the area's other roads.

[Henry]

Well, there's the part about splitting it up for three different purposes:

Think of the spur as being made up of three sections. The wide portion near the 5, too close to freeway traffic to be suitable for housing (at least until the promised era of electric, driverless cars arrives), could be ideal for solar arrays or storm water treatment.

The middle third could hold a mixture of park space and new housing. Apartments could also be built alongside or cantilevered out over the bed of the old freeway, rising from what is now Caltrans right-of-way.

The final section, where the 2 joins the street grid and connects to Glendale Boulevard, could become a sloping, south-facing park, dotted with urban farms or public art.

But then...

For the most part, when urban highways are decommissioned or rerouted, drivers adapt more quickly and easily than anticipated, keeping the feared traffic apocalypse at bay. This was true with San Francisco's Embarcadero (taken down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake) and freeways in other cities.

This plan – to redesign an elevated freeway as housing and public space rather than tear it down – is a slightly different animal. Traffic engineers would have to study the potential ripple effects on traffic in other parts of the city (just as they are now considering the effect of closing a section of the Terminal Island Freeway in Long Beach).

Drivers who use the 2 to get from the southern Glendale area to the 101 would have to find new routes. Other drivers would be inconvenienced as well.

Politically, pulling off this transformation would also be – well, complicated. Los Angeles would have to persuade the state to close the spur to traffic and either sell the land to the city or jointly redevelop it.

However, it would be interesting to see this actually come to fruition, because the benefits would outweigh the cost.

[Occidental Tourist]

The comments on the LA Times site for the article parrot some of the comments here:  It's a lot of pie-in-the-sky without any actual understanding of the engineering involved in handling the displaced traffic.  I give Caltrans crap for some of the boneheaded stuff they do with routing and signage, but they do tend to be highly cognizant of the traffic and other complicated engineering issues that arise from freeway modification or expansion.

Also, the author of the article seems to not have done much homework.  He seems completely unaware of the programmed changes to the 2 terminus already slated to be performed, including moving exit and entrance ramps, reconfiguring intersections, and adding green space.  These programmed modifications went though about 10 years of planning and public comment involving stakeholders and others.  In contrast, the author seems to have passed by the terminus one day and decided his freshly-formed opinion on the matter would make good column copy.

[silverback1065]

this guy should understand traffic engineering before he starts talking.  I'd ignore this article, his claims to the benefits seem to be very overstated. 

[The Ghostbuster]

Journalists who make these kind of don't know about traffic engineering, and just as likely, don't care to know.