Don't Wait for an Invite: 6th Street Viaduct Work Needs Your Input

Eric Richardson

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Downtown has some amazing bridges over the Los Angeles river. Perhaps the most impressive of those, thanks to its 3500 foot length, is the Sixth Street Viaduct (pictured). Unfortunately, the viaduct is on California's Category 1 Bridge List, meaning that it's liable to collapse given a good shaking.

The City's Bureau of Engineering is about to embark on Phase II of a seismic improvement project for the bridge, and they're holding public meetings to get community input. The first of those is next Tuesday, January 23rd. It'll be at 6:30pm at ArtShare (801 4th Place). The flyer I got forwarded (600K PDF) says that

Public participation and input is important for the City to move forward with the project, and specifically to develop acceptable design alternatives.

Yet, as often happens, I'm pretty unclear on who they've actually contacted about this. I received the flyer from Brady two days ago, who had just heard about the meeting that day. Searching for various combinations of terms on Google turns up nothing about this project.

If the city's going to do public outreach I'd really wish they would contact the public. Somehow that concept just hasn't quite caught on.