Santa Monica plans second freeway cap park

Santa Monica City Council approved a proposal to cap an additional portion of the 10 freeway on Tuesday. This second cap park would be over the freeway slot between Ocean Ave and 4th St. The decision comes just months after another park was approved over the Santa Monica Freeway between 14th and 17th Sts. But that project is still in early feasibility stages. This latest development brings the number of LA area freeway cap parks under consideration to 4 - the others over the 101 in Hollywood and Downtown.

City leaders hope a park bridge over this section of the freeway would help create a stronger pedestrian connection between the Third Street shopping area, the pier, and the newly revitalizing civic center. The freeway segment is already conveniently "cut" about 20 ft below ground, but is still exposed to the open air. At Ocean Ave, the freeway briefly tunnels below Ocean Park and the entrance to the pier, before emerging again as the Pacific Coast Highway along the beach. By extending the tunneled portion of the freeway, both parks might also benefit from larger green spaces and greater pedestrian access. The park would also be convenient to the Expo light rail station planned for Colorado Ave and 4th St.

The approval allows spending of ~$300,000 for a feasibility study and ~$3m for initial engineering. Local planning and engineering firm AECOM is charged with conducting the preliminary study and will present its findings to the council within 3 months. The park has been a pipe dream of the city's since at least 1999.

The added land, which is in the super-prime center of Santa Monica, would be more valuable than the cost of capping the freeway. Besides the obvious mitigation of the visual and aural impacts of the freeway, and the shifting of transportation priority from freeways to public transit, projects like this are significant case studies in the frontier of "land creation." As suburban sprawl has lost its appeal in the aftermath of recent economic and environmental events, developers are looking to disprove the old adage 'you can't build more land.' Freeways occupy huge expanses of our built environment, often in inefficient ways. Where freeways have been dug below ground, or where they pass through expensive land, there can be innumerable benefits from capping or reclaiming that ugly and wasteful infrastructure. Santa Monica's experiments should be watched closely by civic leaders and developers everywhere.

Source: Santa Monica Daily Press