LOS ANGELES | Transportation News & Discussion

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Rebuilding the at-grade expo and blue line approaches to the downtown connector ought to be a very high priority but I don't believe that it's in the cue.

That's just putting lipstick on a pig. The Expo Line is fundamentally flawed insofar as the route it traverses between Downtown and Santa Monica is less direct than the 10 Freeway. And the Blue Line along Washington is also another example of how at-grade LRT just follows the street grid, rendering it second-fiddle to the car.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by electricron

To decrease costs of building underground stations is to dig them out with cut and cover techniques. Drilling them out with moving drills may be cheaper for the corridor in general, but much more expensive at station locations.
Either way you build it, the stations must be dug out before the corridor is built, because doing it afterwards requires shutting the corridor down. To keep the corridor up, dig out all the station locations first. Whether you actually build the stations now or later does not matter. Never-the-less, the digging costs for in fill stations is not cheap.

Well, the D Line extension's seven new stations are being constructed using the cut-and-cover method, the total cost for the 9.1-mile project being $9.5 billion. Is $1 billion per station pretty much the standard rate nowadays?

If so, then we need to start using Bechtel's suggested approach for their Sepulveda proposal.