Could LA survive without its freeways? My six-hour vision of a carless future
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Version 0 of 1. Sitting on a Los Angeles freeway – not in a traffic jam but, literally, sitting cross-legged in the middle lane of one of the busiest freeways in the United States – is a contrary infrastructural experience. This is a space passed over by more than 125,000 cars a day, most speeding through at 60, 70 or 80 miles an hour. At a speed of zero, there’s a cognitive dissonance created by the frozen freeway’s stillness. It feels like visiting the moon, a place you know is real but never thought you’d see firsthand. The freeway – a two-mile section of the southbound side of US Route 101, east of downtown Los Angeles – has been completely shut down for six hours this Sunday morning. It’s a rare opportunity for the State Department of Transportation to perform an intensive maintenance job on what otherwise is a constantly flowing river of traffic in three lanes. For these few hours, the river is dry. It’s called “swarm maintenance”, after the crew of more than a hundred workers who are scattered along this stretch of freeway, trimming trees, cleaning debris, repairing lights and making inspections. Entire sections of freeway aren’t often closed down like this, mainly because of the disruption it can cause to the regional transportation system. At a time when cities across the country are considering plans to tear down old freeways and proactively turning over the car-space of streets to pedestrians, six hours without three lanes of freeway in Los Angeles still seems like a lot to ask. In hard-hats and reflective yellow vests, groups of community service workers are clipping tangled vines on the sound protection walls that line the freeway, and hoeing weeds on overgrown hillsides – unpaid work done as partial punishment for crimes including unpaid parking tickets and drunken driving. Department of transportation workers, meanwhile, perform a raft of higher-level tasks that would typically only happen in response to an accident, or when a single lane could be closed for an hour without bottle-necking a region. Light crews replace three “knockdowns” – light poles damaged in car accidents. A guy 30 feet up in the basket of a cherrypicker methodically supplants old lightbulbs on the 60 or so poles lining this section of road with new LED fixtures; three minutes a pop. At the back of another truck, a worker has his hand on a joystick and his eyes on a video monitor as he guides a tiny, four-wheeled camera robot through a drainpipe. It appears damage-free, which is impressive for an underground concrete pipe from the 1940s in seismically-active southern California. Recent rains have washed out any blockages, at least in the dozen-or-so feet within the camera’s view, but it has a few hundred more feet to inspect yet. Nearby, a worker in a full hazmat suit is manning the 20-foot hose of a vacuum truck, pushed deep down into another drain and sucking out a horrible slurry of fetid stormwater, garbage and oil. The freeway is a harsh, dirty environment. Railings are powder-coated with a grey carbon soot. Gutters are swathed with piles of a unique freeway dust made up of dirt, rubber, metal and garbage, all ground down by the incessant movement of cars and wind. The Portland concrete cement roadbed is mostly free of debris, but the small grooves and cracks in the surface are packed tight with that freeway dust. At the roadside, amid the brush and shrubs, garbage large and small is pulled out by the work crews – stripped tyre, front bumper of a blue sedan, bottles, bolts, old clothes. In the trash-strewn central reservation, two large tumbleweeds nestle against a roadsign. Absent of any motion, the freeway has the barren eeriness of an abandoned building. Empty, it is even bigger than you’d expect, and it’s hard not to marvel at the sheer amount of land used to make this small, two-mile stretch that is only a tiny fraction of what’s been cleared and paved worldwide. Walking across it feels about the same as walking across a regular street, albeit with the unshakeable worry that a car might come barrelling by at 70 miles an hour. Looking out down the lanes, as they slowly curve into the distance, the unfolding carpet of concrete as far as you can see gives the sensation of being very, very small. Seeing a road like this, drained of its traffic, inevitably leads one to wonder whether it needs to be reopened at all. For Los Angeles, freeways serve a critical role – yet their inevitability in the modern metropolis is becoming less certain around the world. Perhaps even Los Angeles can rethink its transportation system in a way that would allow the closure of some of its famous freeways. Maybe I am glimpsing a vision of the future. Hours later, the freeway is back open to the masses. Cars and trucks are again driving through this short section, heading south at speeds that could kill. They’re passing all the inspected stormdrains and new light poles and trimmed trees in fractions of a second, traversing hundreds of feet of concrete pavement in mere moments. The freeway landscape is once again seen but not seen, overlooked and forgotten, yet very much a dominating presence in this city. |