Roads

The road is scarred with skid marks, some curved like snakes, others pencil straight. They shriek the fates of unlucky travelers who lost their lives; they mark the near-misses. It's not just the treacherous potholes, or the edges of the road nibbled away like cookies. It's not the dozing driver behind the glaring truck headlights about to veer onto the wrong side. People here in central Zimbabwe are afraid of something else.

It has taken sweat, serendipity and five hours for Matthew Schwartz to find a single paw print of a Florida panther stamped in the swamp muck. He has bushwhacked through knee-high saw grass and saffron-colored love vine in search of the predator's milieu. But winds across the fields must be easterly, or planes headed to the Fort Lauderdale airport will chase the big cats into the remotest corners of the preserve. "There it is!"

Ken Gibson can tell you that it's a little eerie to hear the "William Tell" overture float through your bedroom window at 2 in the morning. He first thought the noise was a neighbor playing a xylophone. His neighbor was convinced it was a ghost. Across West Avenue K in Lancaster, where the flat brown desert rises up into purple mountains, two others thought the noise was the high school marching band. They all soon learned that the tune was coming from a musical road installed by Honda Motor Co.

A Lincoln Heights man who blocked a hillside street with a gate was ordered Friday to open it and leave it unlocked so neighbors can have access to their homes. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge said Gardner Compton violated neighborhood residents' rights by preventing them from driving on the narrow roadway they have used for decades. Judge David P. Yaffe said he will decide next month whether to make the ban on Compton's gate permanent.

A gated domain of sports stars, A-list actors, media billionaires and nouveau riche Angelenos -- where 11,000 square feet constitutes a "cozy" house and a developer once built a $20-million manse on spec -- is embroiled in a legal fracas that shows once and for all that money can't buy happiness. The court battle began in May, when residents of South Beverly Park sued their confreres in North Beverly Park. These aren't just any residents.

California officials are counting on Washington to inject billions of dollars in transportation money to help revive the state economy. But a public advocacy group said the state's wish list of projects would undermine efforts to repair and modernize the state's crumbling infrastructure and reduce U.S. dependence on oil.

Relief is coming to drivers on some of Southern California's busiest freeways, but not enough, according to local transportation planners who say the region is being shortchanged on its share of bond money voters authorized in November. State officials on Friday announced the first projects likely to be bankrolled with the funds, part of a public works borrowing package championed by the governor.

On the eve of their vote today to allocate $4.5 billion in statewide transportation funds, members of the California Transportation Commission were the guests at a cocktail reception in Irvine on Tuesday night paid for by road designers and engineering firms. More than 100 people representing county transportation agencies across the state also attended the reception at the Atrium Hotel.

Desperate to raise cash to make room for more cars on the freeways, California's main road-building agency is wielding an unexpected weapon: the state's environmental laws. Caltrans, long foiled by lawsuits accusing it of recklessly plowing over the habitat of endangered species, polluting the air and contaminating waterways, is now filing its own legal challenges.

John Rachor, a helicopter pilot, has spent much of his life hiking in, driving through or flying over the thick forests and rocky Siskiyou Mountains that rise from the Rogue River here. It was Rachor, acting on a hunch, who found Kati Kim and her two young daughters in December, a week after the Kim family disappeared down a remote federal logging road while trying to make its way to the Oregon coast.