“Carmageddon 2”—the nickname for the coming closure of the San Diego (405) Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass—is now set for the last weekend of September, local transportation officials announced Thursday.
The 10-mile stretch of the nation’s busiest freeway will shut down late Friday evening, Sept. 28 and remain closed through Sunday evening, Sept. 30, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said. Approximately 250,000 vehicles travel through the Sepulveda Pass on a typical weekend.
The San Diego freeway begins in Irvine and runs through parts of Orange County before reaching Long Beach and proceeding north through Los Angeles County. Significant closures of any section of the freeway tend to effect traffic in the entire region.
The closure will allow construction workers to demolish the northern half of the 50-year-old Mulholland Drive bridge. The southern half of the bridge was demolished last July in the first “Carmageddon” closure.
The work is all part of the $1 billion Interstate 405 improvement project that involves widening the freeway to accommodate a new northbound carpool lane, building of new bridges and construction of “flyover” ramps at Wilshire Boulevard. The aim of the project is to reduce congestion on the freeway and on streets near the freeway that are often gridlocked.
A similar closure last year prompted hundreds of thousands of motorists throughout the region to avoid roads and freeways, producing the lightest traffic flow since the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. The closure had a mixed impact on local businesses: some saw customer traffic drop as people avoided the area, but others saw more customers as lightly-traveled roads made it easier to get around.
“Drivers heard our warnings and stayed off the roads,” said L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member. “I have every confidence they’ll rise to the occasion again.”
Fine is a reporter for the Los Angeles Business Journal, a sister publication of the Orange County Business Journal.
