Bob Anderson’s relationship with the 405 freeway goes back more than 50 years. In the early ’70s he and three co-workers piled into his red Chevrolet Corvair for a 25-minute commute from West Los Angeles to their aerospace jobs in the San Fernando Valley. The Corvair, a 1964 model from his college days, was never meant to have air conditioning, but that didn’t matter. The windows opened and the car was moving. A Southern California breeze flowed through.
There’s scant joy in such a commute in 2026. It can take an hour to cover 10 miles on the 405 during morning and evening rush hours. It’s called the “San Diego” freeway, but the 405 doesn’t go all the way to that city. The 72-mile highway runs north-south through metropolitan Los Angeles, connecting Orange County and the San Fernando Valley. Its worst bottlenecks happen on the miles through the Sepulveda Pass, a stretch through the Santa Monica Mountains that experiences more than 400,000 vehicle trips each day.
Workers in valley communities depend on the pass to reach Westside jobs in the health-care, construction, technology, entertainment and service industries. In a famously car-centric city like Los Angeles, the long commutes are a source of environmental harm as well as personal misery. Vehicle emissions help make Los Angeles air some of the most polluted in any American city.
But there will soon be a path to relief for beleaguered Angelenos. In January, the Metro Board approved a proposal for an underground heavy rail line that could take passengers from the Westside to the San Fernando Valley in 20 minutes. It’s a complex, ambitious rail project that could transform how tens of thousands of residents move around the city.
“It’s a once-in-a-generation investment,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor and Metro Board member Lindsey Horvath.
A New Plan After Decades of Gridlock
Automobiles first traveled through the Sepulveda Pass in the 1920s, sharing dirt roads with horse-drawn carts. A tunnel through the mountains was completed in 1930. By the 1950s, more than 40,000 vehicles a day crowded the tunnel’s two lanes, and crashes were common. Work crews dug an opening through the canyon big enough for an eight-lane freeway, and the section of the 405 that goes through the pass opened in 1962.
This freeway was still a dream transportation solution when Anderson first drove it. But congestion soon became unmanageable, and L.A. residents and public officials have been searching for ways to improve the situation for years. In 2014, the state added another lane in each direction on the freeway at a cost of $1.1 billion. It didn’t work — a year after the new lanes opened, commutes were a minute slower than before.
In 2016, L.A. County voters approved a tax increase to fund new transit projects, among them a rail line through the Sepulveda Pass. But it wasn’t until January that Metro selected a plan for a heavy rail subway over other proposed options for an above-ground monorail.
“There was no chance the monorails were going to succeed,” Anderson says. They were too expensive, took too long to build, and residents were concerned about noise. “Our community told them over and over to eliminate the alternative that was above ground. I don’t know how it happened, but they took us seriously.”
Lindsey Horvath's Office
The plan isn’t without its doubters. Some residents of wealthy communities on the Westside have raised concerns about noise from the underground train. Bel Air resident Fred Rosen, the founder of Ticketmaster, has filed multiple lawsuits in an effort to stop or delay the subway, charging that Metro did not properly consult with Bel Air residents. He’s invested more than $1 million, questioning Metro’s ability to finish it on time and within budget.
The resistance hasn’t deterred Metro or other public officials. “If we live in fear of the threat of litigation, we won’t build anything at all,” Horvath told the Hollywood Reporter.
Metro’s preliminary cost estimate for the Sepulveda Transit Project is $24.2 billion. The city plans to use $5.7 billion from sales taxes L.A. voters approved to pay for transit projects, says Anthony Crump, executive officer for community relations at Metro. State and federal funds will be part of the mix, and the agency is also considering a public-private partnership. The Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation estimates subway construction will generate as much as $40 billion in economic output and create up to 200,000 jobs.
If all goes according to plan, the project could open by the late 2030s. In the meantime, Metro is also planning immediate steps to reduce congestion, Crump says, including converting carpool lanes in the Sepulveda Pass to paid express lanes. Such “congestion pricing” is the best way to reduce traffic in the short term, says Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute for Transportation Studies. It can be politically unpopular, but it has been shown to be effective in big cities such as New York.
Driving has long been the primary mode of transportation for most Angelenos, but Crump says he sees more willingness to embrace a non-car-centric lifestyle. For the last 20 years, Metro has worked to increase public transit options within its nearly 1,500-square-mile service area by building rail lines. Today, 110 miles of rail-based transit serve tens of thousands of commuters. Metro is focused on last-mile strategies to get riders to transit stations, via van pickup services or robotaxi vouchers for low-income residents.
For Anderson’s part, he believes strongly in expanding public transit through the pass. He just turned 79; though he might never ride through the tunnel, he’s convinced of its importance. “It needs to exist,” he says.
