Railroad Bridge Over Freeway Won’t Be There After ’92

Dear Street Smart:

The widening of the Santa Ana Freeway from the “El Toro Y” to the Costa Mesa Freeway would seem to be progressing well. All the adjacent lands, and all the bridges either over the freeway or under it, have been affected by the construction. Except for one. The railroad bridge over the freeway south of Red Hill Avenue is untouched.

My concern is that the project will be complete except for this one bottleneck. Will the bridge either be lengthened or eliminated on time, or will it become the potential bottleneck that it appears to be?

Alan Barlow

El Toro

That abandoned railroad bridge will definitely be touched. In a big way.

First some kudos for the old structure. The bridge has come in handy for Caltrans during the Santa Ana Freeway widening project. Workers have used it as an access road for trucks hauling dirt over the busy highway.

But as the project nears completion in early 1993, the bridge will be removed to make way for the freeway expansion, according to Hank Alonso, resident engineer for the project. He expects the bridge to be removed around the summer of 1992. After that, dirt will be deposited in that stretch to raise the grade of the highway, which currently dips into a depression to make its way under the bridge.

While the bridge won’t represent a bottleneck for the new 12-lane stretch of freeway that will be unveiled in 1993, life won’t be completely rosy along the Santa Ana Freeway for several years thereafter. Sections north of Newport Boulevard will be completed in different phases starting in the fall of 1994. Don’t expect the entire project to be completed until later this decade.

Dear Street Smart

In the new Arco gasoline, the benzene has been reduced 35%; aromatics, 17%; hydrocarbons, 21%; carbon monoxide, 28%.

What effect will this have on my next smog check with my ’78 Volvo?

Marvin Brehm

Irvine

A chemical engineer I am not, so I went to one.

Bill Dickinson, manager of engineering and technology for Arco in Los Angeles, said the company’s new EC-1 and EC-Premium gasolines certainly help reduce emissions during normal driving, and that benefit should reflect in a smog test.

But he said motorists shouldn’t expect to squeak by a smog test because they use the new, reduced-emission gasolines. Even the new gasolines don’t help a car much when it isn’t running properly.

Bill Sessa, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, agreed.

“Even if a car is running on clean gasoline, it’s not going to matter much if it’s malfunctioning,” Sessa said. “There are just too many factors involved to answer whether a car will pass or not.”

Sessa noted that Arco’s new gasolines are just the start of a whole switch toward cleaner fuels by oil companies. Later this month, the Air Resources Board is expected to adopt specifications that will ensure that all grades of gasoline sold in California are less polluting.

Arco’s reduced-emission gases are simply “an early industry response” to the new specifications soon to go before the air board, he said. Consumers will soon see other oil companies begin marketing similar cleaner gasolines at the stations throughout the state.