Road Repair

Two years ago, California voters approved the sale of nearly $43 billion in state bonds for housing, transportation, education and water projects. Today, the borrowing is beginning to pay off, one job at a time. A pot of bond money is now delivering road jobs in Santee in San Diego County, in Lincoln in the Sierra foothills and in Marysville in the Sacramento Valley.

Maybe they should order up an extra-thick red carpet for this year's Academy Awards ceremony. Workers are racing to fix a buckling section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of the Kodak Theatre, where cracked terrazzo and broken sidewalk stars could be a major Manolo Blahnik hazard for starlets arriving for the Oscars.

A contractor faces $450,000 in penalties for being nine days late completing the first part of a Garden Grove Freeway widening project, officials said Monday. A preliminary agreement with the contractor, Granite-Myers-Rados, called for a $50,000-a-day penalty for work not finished by Nov. 30, 2006, an Orange County Transportation Authority spokesman said. The contractor had unsuccessfully argued for fines of $5,000 a day.

A safety improvement project has closed a 3.3 mile stretch of Ortega Highway from 8:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. for three years. The segment will be open during the day, but reduced to one lane that will alternate between eastbound and westbound traffic.

State officials on Monday significantly increased the amount of bond money they plan to allocate this year for road projects, including carpool lanes for the heavily congested 405 Freeway though Westwood and the Sepulveda Pass. The staff of the California Transportation Commission recommended that $4.5 billion in bond funds be earmarked for dozens of projects statewide instead of the $2.8 billion proposed Feb. 16.

When Mayor Greg Nickels uses the phrase "the Big Ugly," he is referring to the 2.2-mile-long Alaskan Way Viaduct, the aging, earthquake-vulnerable elevated expressway that separates much of downtown Seattle from Elliott Bay, one of the city's iconic natural features. But the Big Ugly also is an apt characterization of the political debacle unfolding here over whether -- and how -- the 54-year-old concrete roadway should be replaced.

Georgia highway officials investigating a deadly bus crash said Tuesday that they would add safety measures to several commuter-lane exits like the one a baseball team's bus took before it plunged off an overpass two weeks ago. Seven people on the bus died, five of them baseball players from Bluffton University in Ohio. Georgia Department of Transportation spokesman David Spear said the state would be adding signs and reflective striping to seven similar ramps starting today.

Caltrans will close all lanes of the southbound 405 Freeway from the Santa Monica Freeway to Venice Boulevard from 1 to 5 a.m. Monday and Tuesday. The northbound 405 will be closed from Venice Boulevard to the Santa Monica connector from 1 to 5 a.m. Wednesday and Thursday. Braddock Drive will be closed in both directions between Sawtelle Boulevard and the Braddock onramp to the southbound 405 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each weekday until April 13.

Motorists using the city's most congested main streets will have a smoother ride as part of a new program of pothole repairs targeting the busiest roadways. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Operation Smooth Ride on Monday as he helped a street crew repair a pothole on Sunset Boulevard.

Motorists driving the Santa Ana Freeway will encounter nightly construction delays beginning Sunday. Ten miles of asphalt is scheduled to be replaced with rubberized pavement from the El Toro Y in Irvine north to Fourth Street in Santa Ana, Caltrans officials said. In addition, they said, the repaving of Jeffrey Road and the I-5 interchange onramp will occur nightly from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. The $14-million pavement project is expected to be completed in October.