Freeways

A little bit of the future is coming to Los Angeles freeways later this year in the form of "smart" road studs that gauge road conditions and traffic flow and open and close a freeway lane accordingly. Caltrans has contracted with a New Zealand company to pilot the "dynamic-lane" system on the 110 Freeway where traffic backs up in a tunnel at the single-lane connector to northbound Interstate 5.

If they can win a huge federal grant, Los Angeles County transportation officials said Tuesday that rush-hour toll lanes could become a reality on three local freeways by spring 2009. The prediction underscored what has been a radical turnaround for leaders who only eight months ago were reluctant to do anything more than study "congestion pricing" as a way to discourage drivers when freeways are clogged.

Making broad pronouncements about the need to protect the health of children in their care, the Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday restricted the district's ability to build schools near freeways and other sources of air pollution.

All lanes of the 91 Freeway -- the major east-west artery between Orange and Riverside counties -- will be shut down in Corona for nearly 12 hours beginning tonight, a closure that Caltrans officials warn could cause hours of delays for drivers who fail to use alternative routes. The closure of the highway at Green River Road is scheduled to begin at 11 tonight and end at 11:30 a.m. Sunday.

A herd of horses trotted onto the 91 Freeway in Corona early Monday, causing two collisions that killed one of the animals, forced authorities to close the road for roughly five hours and left three motorists with minor injuries. The horses, about a dozen in all, escaped from Hart Ranch and a neighboring property and bolted several hundred yards in the predawn darkness to the freeway, near Green River Road, said Donna Hart, co-owner of the ranch.

An incident Monday morning in which six vehicles were shot at with a BB or pellet gun on the 10 Freeway appears to be unrelated to two freeway shootings that occurred over the weekend, authorities said. The windows of six vehicles were struck by pellets or BBs during a five-minute period around 8 a.m. along the westbound stretch of the San Bernardino Freeway between Frazier Street and the 605 Freeway in Baldwin Park, California Highway Patrol Officer Edmund Zorrilla said.

It was the 4 1/2 minutes that forever changed the California Highway Patrol. Thirty-eight years ago today, four CHP officers died in a fierce gunfight with a pair of heavily armed motorists outside a Valencia coffee shop after a seemingly routine traffic stop.

Anti-billboard activists have mounted a last-ditch effort to derail a proposal before the Los Angeles City Council that would place two 76-foot-tall billboards next to the 10 Freeway as part of an unusual trade-off to create a park in South Los Angeles.

Expanding one of the nation's busiest freeway interchanges won't make life easier for some weary commuters. A new ramp proposed for the 101-405 interchange in Sherman Oaks would destroy part of a wildlife reserve in the Sepulveda Basin that provides a rare resting place for migrating Canada geese, environmentalists say. "We've trained the geese to come here for 20 years and forage in grasses we planted," said Steve Hartman, a volunteer with the California Native Plant Society.

It started with an officer being shot and ended in a classic only-in-L.A. moment when a man with a gun darted back and forth across the busy Riverside Freeway in a shootout with police that resulted in the gunman being killed and a motorist wounded in the crossfire. By the time commuters hit the road Monday morning, the first-of-the-week crush in Orange County had already been badly snarled.