State to Begin 710 Freeway Overhaul

Caltrans announced plans Friday to overhaul the 43-year-old Long Beach Freeway, starting with an 18-month project that will result in disruptive freeway detours and lane closures.

The freeway, which is heavily traveled by trucks serving the ports, is one of the state’s worst in terms of congestion and deteriorating pavement.

Motorists commonly complain that the freeway is so rough they fear they have blown a tire because of the loud thumping they hear when they hit a stretch of the roadway south of the San Diego Freeway.

“It’s exceeded its life expectancy by 23 years,” said Doug Failing, deputy director of Caltrans operations in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Caltrans officials said that with the Harbor, Santa Ana and other older freeways all in need of work, they are using the Long Beach Freeway project to test a state-of-the-art asphalt pavement that they hope will last two or three times longer than material currently in use.

The first stretch to be resurfaced will be a 2.5-mile section from Pacific Coast Highway to the San Diego Freeway in Long Beach.

Preliminary work is underway, with sections of the freeway already being closed during the early morning. The work in Long Beach will also include replacing the existing metal center divider with concrete barriers and widening the shoulders of the freeway.

For the next few months, work will be done during weeknights when traffic is lighter.

The most intensive work is expected to begin next spring, when officials plan to close lanes on that stretch of highway for an unprecedented 10 weekends. During the weekend closures, two lanes of traffic in each direction will remain open.

The weekend lane closures were tried with success for the first time last year on the San Bernardino Freeway. They are an effort to concentrate work over a 55-hour period.

Traditionally, Caltrans crews move onto a freeway work site late at night, moving in equipment, setting up cones and getting work underway. Then they shut down the operation after a few hours, hauling the equipment away. Caltrans believes closing lanes on weekends will save a significant amount of time that would have been spent setting up and closing down the work sites.

Traffic will be detoured onto the Harbor, Terminal Island and San Gabriel River freeways, which are designated truck routes.

Big rigs constitute about 13% of the Long Beach Freeway’s traffic. The freeway’s original design anticipated that trucks would constitute 5% of its traffic.

The first segment will cost $16.7 million. Work is expected to be completed at the end of next year. Eventually, Caltrans plans to resurface the whole 20-mile freeway from Long Beach to the San Bernardino Freeway at a cost of $400 million. That effort is expected to last six years.

The project has been sought for years by Long Beach political and business leaders.

City leaders refer to the freeway as “the gateway to the city,” since it is the best way to get to the shoreline and attractions like the Queen Mary and Aquarium of the Pacific. But they believe the freeway is such a mess that it creates negative impressions of the city.

“How sweet it is,” City Councilman Dan Baker said during Friday’s announcement of the freeway project in Long Beach City Hall. Baker said the city had “been waiting a long time” for Caltrans to fix the freeway.

City leaders heaped as much scorn on the freeway as they did praise on Caltrans for taking on the project.

Assemblyman Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) talked about how his head bounces into the roof of his car because of the ruts in the freeway. Someone else talked about encountering turbulence not normally associated with freeways.

Caltrans’ Failing said the noise and rough ride are created by slabs of old pavement rising up on one end, creating cracks and gaps.