Jerry B Baxter

The infant Century Freeway apparently has passed its first tremor test with flying colors, Caltrans officials said. A preliminary inspection of the 3-month-old freeway found no stress cracks or other damage after last week's magnitude 6.6 earthquake. The 105 Freeway has some of the county's highest overpasses. Caltrans engineers said they were not surprised that the 17.

Work has begun on a seven-mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway to add a car-pool lane in each direction between the Harbor Freeway and 120th Street near Hawthorne. Planners believe that the $7.9-million project will not interfere with rush-hour traffic before it is completed about the middle of next year. Each of the existing four lanes of traffic, however, will be narrowed from 12 feet to 11 feet, contract administrator Earl Fukumoto said.

The infant Century Freeway apparently has passed its first tremor test with flying colors, Caltrans officials said. A preliminary inspection of the 3-month-old freeway found no stress cracks or other damage after Monday's magnitude 6.6 earthquake. The 105 Freeway has some of the county's highest overpasses. Caltrans engineers said they were not surprised that the 17.

With billions of dollars going into subway and rail construction projects in Los Angeles, how can we ensure that the public is getting a first-rate system, one that is safe and cost-effective? That's undeniably the Metropolitan Transit Authority's responsibility.

As snow and ice frosted the Golden State Freeway early Thursday, Caltrans officials for the first time had a computerized edge against Mother Nature in keeping the mountainous route through northern Los Angeles County open to traffic. Electronic sensors installed along the freeway's perilous winter route over the Tehachapi Mountains fed measurements of temperature, precipitation and other roadway conditions to a command center in Lebec.

Close on the heels of the massive project to repair the earthquake-damaged Simi Valley Freeway, work will begin anew before year's end to enlarge the freeway by four lanes, Caltrans announced Wednesday. The California Transportation Commission, meeting in Sacramento this week, allocated $11.8 million to widen the freeway from west of the Los Angeles/Ventura County line to the Golden State Freeway, a distance of about 12 miles.

State highway officials Monday released additional details of a $23-million construction project along the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley and predicted the work will not increase traffic congestion. If motorists embrace such traffic-reduction measures as van pools and bypass routes, freeway volume should drop by about 4% from present levels along the Tarzana-to-Calabasas project, state Department of Transportation officials said.

At first glance, viewers of Los Angeles' cable television Channel 35 may have been alarmed by the tangle of yellow and green lines and flashing red lights that filled their screens early Wednesday morning. What they saw was a new computerized traffic watch system from Caltrans called Freeway Vision, which uses a color-coded map to indicate traffic conditions on the Southland's 750 miles of freeways to help commuters find alternate routes.