Posted on 02/10/2018 6:41:05 PM PST by BenLurkin
The California Department of Transportation, in cooperation with a joint powers authority, will in June begin buying land to build a 63-mile high desert freeway connecting the Los Angeles County communities of Palmdale and Lancaster with the San Bernardino County communities of Victorville, Apple Valley and Adelanto.
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The county’s first new freeway in a quarter-century is something of a throwback, as regional planners have shifted their focus in recent years toward mass transit and infill development to combat snarled traffic and housing shortages. Yet it serves as a reminder that even as Los Angeles moves to encourage more density in its urban neighborhoods, development continues to push into the scrublands on the county’s fringes.
...Palmdale and Lancaster have seen their populations surge — even landing among the nation’s 10 fastest-growing cities in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. T
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The environmental impact report has already been approved, paving the way for right of way agents to begin acquiring land this spring with $274 million generated by Measure M, a sales tax increase approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2016 to build transportation projects over the next 40 years.
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State and county officials say they may decide to build in phases as funding becomes available. Proposals to make certain stretches of the freeway, or its entire length, a toll road are also under discussion, officials say.
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The route would run roughly parallel to State Route 18 and State Highway 138, also known as Pearblossom Highway. Congestion is a problem on Highway 138 thanks to big rigs, commuters and travelers to Las Vegas.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Grandson went to Village Christian in Sun Valley and it was a 25 minute drive for me! HA...
Of course we are nearing our 80’s!!
I thought that was bad....but yikes.. 100 miles a day. I would do it too if it meant quality schooling!!
That should appeal to New Yorker's and other eastern urban types, the ones that skewed California politics in the 70's. L.A. wants to be more like eastern liberal hellholes.
So glad I lived there growing up in the Golden Age, only to see the decline. Got out just in time, cashing in on the insane real estate prices. We get a biter laugh out of the news of decay and degradation.
This is what happens when stupid people get lots of money.
The desert was my playground as a child/youth. We use to climb & build treehouses in the Joshua trees. Good times.
Gee.
Thanks.
You can move a heck of a lot more people with a lane of freeway than you can with a train. But trains generate fares that can be easily embezzled, so leftists prefer trains.
This should have been 100% built and owned and operated by private enterprise.
Why not just build a giant conveyor belt? You drive onto the belt from side street belts, You have a choice to put it in park for a long ride or you can let the auto drive take over because on the beltway (!) You have no control....
It will be another 25 years before they even turn dirt, if at all. All it needs is an endangered bug and this will just join the ash heap of planned but never finished projects. But just think of all those people who will get paid for years in the planning process.
The “no highways in rich areas” is classic in central CT. The “beltway” around Hartford was completed in all the poor areas, and not one inch was built in a rich area—and has remained in this status for fifty years!
The result is flyover exit ramps to nowhere.
Some pigs are more equal than others.
The early highway builders would have done well to have given stronger preference to the low hanging fruit during both the planning and construction phases — swamplands, uninhabited forests, abandoned industrial sites — before tackling the areas where anyone with common sense could have foreseen controversy. For the latter they ought to have developed more effective strategies for “gingerly” road building. They didn’t, and the new rule of thumb is: highways just don’t get built.
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And give the drive-by shooters a faster way out of town.
On the way to Reno, the my least favorite stretch of Rte. 395 is through the Adelanto area. It’s stop-and-go with a lot of red lights. This is followed by a long stretch of a two-lane road in which passing is prohibited, so if you get behind a slow poke, you’re out of luck until you get to Kramer Junction.
I find it’s actually faster to take the 15 through Victorville to D Street, which is old Rte. 66, and cut across. If it’s breakfast or lunch time, I’ll stop at Emma Jean’s Holland Burger Cafe on old 66 just west of the 15.
The long awaited Meth Lab Freeway.
“”Traveled numerous times on Pearblossom Highway.””
Same here from OC to Hi Vista - 20 miles east of Lancaster - to visit inlaws... Quiet, peaceful time on weekends away from the city!! The road had dips in it and our daughter at a young age would laugh every time we went down and then up...
The pictures in the article bring back a lot of memories. We did a lot of shooting out there in the middle of nowhere...
In 1959 my parents were turned away from buying a house in a new tract development in Pomona because they were black. Didn't matter that my dad was an Army Captain in uniform, and my mom looked like Jackie Kennedy with a suntan. They were forced to buy a home in Compton anyway.
It didn't matter that my parents were quality people. Their complexion was just a shade too 'enriched'.
Apparently, its still 1959 in South Pasadena.
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