Alameda Corridor

A half-mile bridge on Pacific Coast Highway in Wilmington designed to ease congestion opened Thursday, ending years of construction along the Alameda Corridor rail and truck passageway. The stretch of highway between the Terminal Island Freeway and Coil Avenue had been closed since June, said John Canalis of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority.

Transportation planners are seeking to build new highways exclusively for trucks that would stretch from Southern California's booming ports to as far away as the Inland Empire.

An underground tunneling mishap that created a sinkhole in southeast Los Angeles forced authorities to temporarily close one of three tracks on the Alameda Corridor rail line, officials said Thursday. The depression caused no damage to the tracks that carry cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to rail yards near downtown, officials said.

A regional transportation agency approved a contract Thursday to build one of the last and most vexing projects on the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor. The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority awarded $107 million for a half-mile-long bridge to carry traffic on Pacific Coast Highway over the corridor's railroad tracks in Wilmington. The agency hired Yeager Skanska Inc. of Riverside as lead construction contractor.

A year after it opened, the $2.5-billion Alameda Corridor rail line is operating at less than half its capacity and has failed to lure enough business to put a dent in the crushing numbers of tractor-trailers clogging the Long Beach Freeway and other routes leading from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Boosters of the Alameda Corridor bragged last year that the 20-mile, $2.5-billion rail line from Southern California ports to downtown Los Angeles came in on time and under budget. They're silent now about shippers not rushing to use it. And truck traffic on the jammed Long Beach Freeway is as dense as ever. It's not just a matter of enticing the shippers.

Re "Freeway Tragedy Is No Surprise, Experts Say," Oct. 11: The recent tragedy on the 710 Freeway underscores the validity of the arguments against extending the 710 through Alhambra, South Pasadena and Pasadena, connecting it to the 210 Freeway. Any plan that encourages or enhances additional traffic of tractor-trailers on the 710 will serve only to increase the likelihood of such accidents in other congested areas along the extended route. Presently, the transition of the 210 in west Pasadena at the 134 Freeway is a dangerous enough proposition at almost any time of day. The influx of trucks that would result from the 710 extension would make it significantly more so. Philip V. Mann Pasadena The Times had excellent articles on these problems last May. It is a serious omission in this article to not mention the Alameda Corridor and its relationship to the problem.

Several months ago, I started seeing the "Alameda Corridor not running at capacity" theme in print, and I note that you have repeated it here ("Keep on Trucking at the Ports," James Flanigan, Oct. 22). In response, I would have to say, "I hope not!" Constructing the corridor was a very expensive and disruptive project. If it were running near capacity now, less than two years from opening day, we would be shaking our heads, saying, "What were the designers thinking?" Look at the intermodal traffic growth figures for the last five years, and look at the projections.

A deal struck between the city of Vernon and the governmental agency overseeing work on the Alameda Corridor rail project will smooth the way for construction of the project while easing the impact on businesses in the city, an agency spokeswoman said Friday. Vernon is the last of the so-called corridor cities--cities that lie along the path of the project--to reach agreement with the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's inspector general has concluded that weak or nonexistent internal controls allowed a major engineering firm to overcharge the agency more than $2.1 million for work on the Metro Rail subway project.