'BLOOD ALLEY' FIX UP FOR VOTE HIGHWAY 138 WORK PROPOSED.

Byline: JIM SKEEN

Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- A series of projects to widen Highway 138 and to improve the Antelope Valley Freeway will come before state officials next week for votes, regional transportation leaders said Wednesday.

Coming before the California Transportation Commission at its June 6 and 7 meeting will be requests for $22.7 million for a car-pool lane connector between the freeway and Interstate 5; $10.9 million for a roundabout on Palmdale's east side; $9.2 million to widen Highway 138 from 96th to 106th streets east; and $7.1 million for widening that highway between 60th Street East to just east of Avenue T.

"Nothing is a slam dunk," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. "I am hopeful the CTC will approve it. We have to wait and see."

Highway 138 picked up the moniker "Blood Alley" because of fatal collisions often involving impatient motorists trying to pass in areas where the route is just two lanes wide. The state Department of Transportation is widening the highway to four lanes in segments as funding allows.

Regional transportation officials are also hopeful the commission will approve $15.8 million to bridge a funding gap in a $32 million project to widen Highway 138 from 165th Street East to Largo Vista Road.

Originally, officials had hoped to tap funds from Proposition 1B, the $19.9 billion transportation bond measure approved in November, for the project. But the commission rejected the request in February prompting Caltrans officials to begin looking for alternative funding sources for the project.

Some funding is available to expand portions of the highway including $24 million to widen the Twin Bridges area from 146th to 165th streets east from two lanes to four. That project is slated for completion late this year, Caltrans officials said.

Twin Bridges has been the scene of numerous collisions, including one in 1995 that killed three people. The stretch of highway has no shoulder for a driver to use if an oncoming vehicle crosses the center line.

Further east, on the San Bernardino County portion, motorists can expect detours this summer as Highway 138 is widened to include a truck lane, a 4-foot-wide median, wider shoulders and additional lanes through some stretches. The highway will be shut down between Horse Canyon and Lone Pine Canyon roads from June 11 to Sept. 11, said Dennis Green, construction liaison for Caltrans.

A section of the highway was closed last summer, but escorts were conducted during morning and evening commute rush hours. This summer there will be no such escorts because of acts of violence against flagmen on the project, including two who were deliberately hit by cars and one who was shot by a BB gun.

"Violence against the workers will not be tolerated," Green said.

Motorists who use the highway to get to Interstate 15 will have to travel east on Highway 18 to make that connection.

Design work on the round-about project is completed. The project will consolidate five closely spaced intersections into one and eliminate the 90-degree curve from Palmdale Boulevard onto 47th Street East.

A round-about is a circular intersection where drivers turn right into the circle, yielding to traffic as they enter, then turn right to exit. Round-abouts are designed so the traffic in the circle is traveling slower than 30 mph. Work is scheduled to begin this year and be complete in 2008.

A $156 million project to build connectors between the car-pool lanes on the A.V. Freeway and the I-5 could begin as early as this fall, depending on how construction bids come in. That project has a projected completion of summer 2011.

A $10 million project to stabilize hillside slopes along the A.V. Freeway is about 75 percent complete. Caltrans said the remaining work will require two to four more freeway closures to complete the work.

Those closures are done on early Sunday mornings to minimize traffic disruption.

james.skeen@dailynews

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