I don’t care what anybody says, New York City is “thee” worst place to operate a tractor trailer. This weekend, with “the” 405 shut down, Los Angeles just might be ‘thee” worst place to drive. “The” 405 is being widened along a 10-mile stretch through the Sepulveda Pass between I-10 and Ventura Boulevard. The California Department of Transportation (DOT) – more commonly referred to as CALTRANS - is erecting a new carpool lane and rebuilding the Mulholland Bridge. All is expected to be done in 53 hours! No, I’m not joking.
If you’re headed in that direction this weekend, I suggest you take a few minutes and follow this link NBC/Carmegeddon/LOTR for alternative truck route suggestions. Probably the best thing you can do is tell your dispatcher to send you elsewhere – a place with less traffic that is much cooler – like Alaska. If you’re headed into Los Angeles in a car or RV, go here ABC/Cameggeddon/LOTR for advise. Good luck.
For those of you who are not familiar with “the” 405, it is (Wikipedia) “a I-5 bypass – approximately 75 miles long. It begins at the El Toro Y interchange with Interstate 5 in southeastern Irvine. It then runs northwest through Orange County to Long Beach in LA County. The freeway then roughly follows the outline of the Pacific coast, varying between five and ten miles inland before crossing over the Sepulveda Pass in the Santa Monica Mountains.
I-405 then travels “gingerly” through the San Fernando Valley, before terminating with I-5 in the Mission Hills district of Los Angeles. The San Diego Freeway’s congestion problems are legendary, leading to the joke that the highway was numbered “the” 405 because traffic crawls at "four or five" miles an hour – average speeds as low as five miles per hour are typically recorded during morning and afternoon commutes.
“It’s interchanges with the Ventura Freeway (US 101) and with the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) each consistently rank among the five most congested freeway interchanges in the United States.” You might recall back on June 17th 1994, O.J. Simpson, suspected in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and waiter Ronald Goldman, took to “the” 405 in a white Ford Bronco with police in pursuit.”
In other trucking related news – I did a couple of posts last week, regarding what exactly is a “truck”. This was about how the media reports “truck” related accidents and how they handled the Nevada Amtrak crash with a tractor trailer. So guess what? Yesterday, another Amtrak train hits a “truck”. I read several accounts of the incident. One said it was a truck, the other said “dump” truck, the third reported it was a tractor-trailer rig. The driver of the “truck” was killed. This happened in North Berwick, Maine – the train was the Amtrak “Downeaster”.
According to Reuters, “A “dump truck” trying to beat a passenger train through a railway crossing collided with the locomotive.” The AP – Associated Press reported that “Police say safety lights were flashing and gates were down when a tractor-trailer crossed into the path of an Amtrak train. One witness reports that the trucker slammed on the brakes and skidded into the intersection before being smashed by the train. The truck was hauling trash to an incinerator.”
Also, following up on a couple of my other posts, specifically addressing Mexico, the whole cross-border trucking issue and the associated problems with violence and the drug cartels - I found this item from The New York Times: 7/11/11, titled “Despite violence, U.S. firms expand in Mexico.” Randal Archbold writes: “Even as drug organizations battle for turf around them, more TV sets are being assembled, car parts boxed up and electronic widgets soldered together in the large manufacturing plants know as maquiladoras. Over all, jobs in Mexico’s manufacturing sector increased 8.2% to 1.8 million.”
“Some of the new or expanding plants come at the expense of plant closings in the U.S. – Electrolux, which makes washers, dryers and other home products, closed a plant in 2009 in Iowa, but opened one in Juarez last month that is expected to employ 400 people.”
These jobs, FYI, pay more than the Mexican average of $8-$16 a day on the assembly line. Archbold continues: “The American economy is expected to grow between 2.7% -2.9% in 2011 – overall, the Mexican economy, the second largest in Latin America after Brazil, grew 5.5% last year, it’s fastest pace in a decade, and is expected to grow 4.5% this year, driven largely by manufacturing as well as internal growth from an expanding middle class.”
Despite the efforts of Mexican President Felipe Calderon to control drug violence, 40,000 people have died in the past five years. The Times quotes the president of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Commission: “Business is business, and the proximity to the U.S. is hard to pass up. The rising cost of labor, transportation and the renminbi (the Chinese currency) have made some businesses reconsider Mexico instead of China. Despite several murders a day, trade being Juarez and Texas rose 47% last year to $71.1 billion”.
The link to the Archbold piece is: NYT/Mexico/LOTR/Crime.
$8-$16 a day?
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