Los Angeles is famous for many things, like its beautiful beaches, its zeitgeist-establishing media industry, and its notoriously mediocre public transportation resources. While LA’s light rail network is mediocre, its bus system is relatively comprehensive, though buses are still subject to another thing LA is famous for: traffic. One way the second-largest city in the United States mitigates the impact of miserable traffic jams on its buses is by allowing them to use carpool lanes and express lanes on otherwise congested freeways. Forcing a city bus to merge across several lanes of rush-hour traffic to enter and exit these centrally located lanes would be a nightmare, so the city established dedicated bus stations in the center median of the 110 freeway. This bus system is called the Harbor Transitway.
The Harbor Transitway runs along the 110 Freeway, also known as the Harbor Freeway as it connects the urban center of Los Angeles to the Port of Los Angeles which are about 30 miles apart. It incorporates eight bus stops, most of which are located in the center median of the freeway. These mid-freeway bus stops are generally placed at freeway overpasses or underpasses where pedestrians use stairs or elevators to get them from street level to the freeway level where they wait for the bus.
Pedestrians waiting for the bus are separated from high-speed freeway traffic rushing behind them by a single waist-height K-rail divider in some areas. Aside from the alarming proximity to speeding semi-trucks and freeway traffic, these stations are also very loud, as you can imagine. Studies have shown that the noise levels at some of these mid-freeway bus stops can be over 90 decibels, despite Metro’s 75 dB design guideline maximum noise limit. Metro has installed plexiglass sound walls at some of these bus stops, but there’s only so much you can do when traffic is rushing past a few inches away.
This transit system is challenging; it provides riders with quicker bus routes thanks to the dedicated freeway lanes, but it forces people to put up with unreasonable noise levels and concerning proximity to high-speed freeway traffic. Without this system, buses would either have to continuously enter and exit the freeways which would significantly slow service and force buses to face the worst of rush hour traffic, or avoid using the freeway all together which would also slow service. The ideal alternative to maximize safety, speed, and convenience for Angelenos would be a more comprehensive subterranean railway system, since subways don’t face rush-hour traffic like buses and road-level railways do. But that would cost a lot of money that the government doesn’t want to spend and would require approval from NIMBY landowners, so the Harbor Transitway’s mid-freeway bus stops are the easiest solution for now.
