The first time I heard the term “Sepulveda pass,” I thought it was a medical procedure. I mean, 
I was still new to The Coast, and sepulveda sounded like one of those oddball body parts, like uvula or something. (Not speaking of which, I no longer have an uvula. No idea why. It used to be there, but now it’s gone. Strange.)
Anyway, Carmageddon is going on right now, and the Sepulveda pass, a section of the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, is shut down. My fave links on the matter so far are here, here and here. One of which is that to which Tony Pierce points.
It’ll all be over on Monday. When it comes to fixing freeways, L.A. doesn’t fuck around. No ‘fence, but the Bay Area does.
We had a controlled study of the difference with a pair of earthquakes. In 1989 the Loma Prieta quake dropped a hunk of freeway (called the Cypress Structure) in Oakland, plus a piece of the Bay Bridge. It also damaged several freeways in San Francisco, including the Embarcadero Freeway and the 101-280 interchange. So, what did they do? They got rid of the Embarcadero and the Cypress Structure, took more than a few days to fix the Bay Bridge… and then took years to fix the 101-280 interchange. Years. Lots of them. Meanwhile, when the Northridge quake dropped a hunk of the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles, they got the thing back up in a month or something. (If I have time later I’ll add the links. Right now I’m in Florence, where traffic is Cuissinart of pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, bicycles and stubby busses. Kind of like the rest of urban Italy, only with a higher ratio of tourists to everything else.)
By the way, the best video you’ll ever see about The 405 is called 405, and was done in 2000 by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt, who also stars in it. The whole thing is just three minutes long, and it’s perfect. Especially right now. Dig.
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