The Brief

A mile-long section of the 10 Freeway near downtown is likely weeks from reopening after a weekend fire. The consensus seems to be that while traffic is worse than usual, it isn’t apocalyptic.

An estimated 300,000 drivers a day rely on the 10 between the East L.A. interchange and Alameda Street.

On Monday there was a 15% traffic increase on city streets near the closure and on Tuesday, the detour routes, which include portions of the 101, and 110, saw 26% more drivers than normal, said Los Angeles Department of Transportation General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo at a Wednesday morning press conference.

We’ve avoided “carmageddon” 3.0, in part because L.A.’s gridlock-navigating veterans are filtering through a web of freeways and surface streets criss-crossing the impacted area.

“If one piece of our network goes down, there's a lot of opportunities for people to make changes and move around those things,” said Brian Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. An unexpected shutdown of a roadway with fewer alternatives would likely be more disruptive.

However, these temporary changes are pushing more cars into freeway-adjacent neighborhoods that are already plagued by some of the worst air pollution in a city infamous for its smog.

Muffy works in Boyle Heights and called into LAist 89.3's public affairs radio show AirTalk on Monday.

“We have terrible traffic here, anyway,” Muffy said. “I'm hoping that this incident is going to bring more attention to this community, which really needs a lot of attention because it's historically ignored, even though it's one of the oldest parts of the city.”

The human cost of L.A.’s freeways

Taylor compares downtown freeways to the spokes on a wheel— they radiate out from the city center.

The goal, in part, was to make it easier for people to commute into and out of downtown, but that convenience came at a cost to past, and current residents.

“The people who lived and worked adjacent to those freeways paid an outsized price of the noise and pollution,” Taylor said.

Air pollution can harm pregnant people and their babies. Children who grow up breathing high levels of air pollution are more likely to develop asthma and long term exposure to air pollution is tied to increased rates of chronic respiratory issues, heart disease, and death.

The people in the areas of Los Angeles with consistently higher levels of air pollution are often Black and Latino, and low income, in part because discriminatory 1930s housing policies made it difficult for people to buy homes in their neighborhoods.

These communities are often breathing in pollutants they didn’t create, according to recent research from the University of Southern California.

“We see whiter travelers, people who drive more, driving through communities where people drive less and are less white,” said Geoff Boeing, who co-authored the paper and is an assistant professor of urban planning and spatial analysis. And these commuters return home to neighborhoods that are less polluted than those they traverse.

Historically, some of L.A. County’s whiter, wealthier communities, including South Pasadena, successfully blocked freeway expansion in their neighborhoods.

Elected officials have repeatedly urged Angelenos to stay home and telecommute and if they must drive, to stick to established detours and avoid cutting through downtown neighborhoods.

“Please remember that our downtown streets, particularly those around the impacted area, are some of our most congested corridors,” Rubio-Cornejo said Wednesday morning.

The 5, 10, 60, and 101 freeways all intersect in Boyle Heights.

"The surrounding neighborhoods are hit with the most impact since drivers are taking the streets where many of our students and their families reside," said Mendez High School teacher Rebecca Gallego. She thinks some students were late to class because of the influx of detouring drivers.

St. Turibius Catholic School is downtown, blocks away from the now-closed section of the 10 Freeway.

Principal Audrey Blanchette re-routed her morning drive from the 10 to Whittier Boulevard, and across the 6th Street Bridge to Central.

“There's just a lot of big rigs on the regular streets that we usually see on the freeway,” Blanchette said.

How and why drivers change course

UCLA’s Taylor also studies travel behavior — the how and why of the ways we move through the world.

“People adjust their behavior by changing their routes, changing the time of their travel, and changing the mode by which they travel, in that order,” Taylor said.

That tracks with John Lewis, who’s been a bus driver in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 1989.

“They'll let you know over the radio to avoid trouble areas, but with my experience of the city, I know how to get around,” Lewis said.

Though he doesn’t regularly drive the 10, he said congestion tends to ripple out from wherever there's a big disruption. That’s another well-studied traffic phenomenon: adding more cars to the road doesn’t really impact any one of those vehicles until the thoroughfare fills up completely — “at which point things become very unstable,” Taylor said. See the sluggish snake of brake lights where cars previously zipped along.

Lewis started his commute earlier this week to accommodate known construction projects and any potential residual traffic from downtown.

“We typically try to route around freeways because they’re such parking lots in the morning,” Lewis said.

The 10 Freeway closure altered about 3% of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 1,300 bus routes Monday, according to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. He said the average delay for students at 13 schools Monday was about 10 to 15 minutes.

Will commuting changes stick?

City officials have also urged would-be drivers to take the bus or Metro.

L.A. Deputy Mayor of Infrastructure Randall Winston said at Wednesday's press conference that the E Line, which runs from Santa Monica to East L.A., saw a 10% increase in ridership the previous day.

Taylor, who studied how drivers reacted to the Sepulveda Pass’s 2011 and 2012 construction closures, said it’s unlikely these changes will stick.

“It becomes an opportunity to alert people that these options exist and that that can be a positive effect,” Taylor said. “But it's unlikely that the event itself … might cause people to reconsider their travel choices.”

So when the 10 eventually re-opens, it’ll be back to our congested status quo.

The U.S. Department of Justice has attempted to use a number of tactics in recent weeks to remove California voters they say are likely noncitizens from state voter rolls — despite the voting process having already begun.

Election security experts told LAist, however, that the federal government’s case is unlikely to succeed, and that voters should proceed filling out their ballots as normal.

“I don't think most people in the L.A. area or beyond will actually encounter any of the disruption that the administration is trying to project,” Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt said.

The backstory

Last week, Department of Justice election officials sent a list of 20,000 California voters it says it has “high confidence” are not citizens. (L.A. County election officials said they received records on a thumb drive, which they could not open for security reasons.) Two days later, the Trump administration sued California for not complying with its request to use the list to remove any noncitizens from local voter rolls.

California on Tuesday filed an extensive response to the DOJ lawsuit, saying it “borders on the absurd.”

Separately this week, the DOJ announced it had filed charges against 28 people, accusing them of registering to vote as noncitizens.

What is the DOJ claiming?

DOJ representatives said Monday they are attempting to keep U.S. citizens’ votes from being canceled out by noncitizens.

“We have an election coming up next month,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney, said. “Our biggest priority is to safeguard the integrity of the election.”

Essayli suggested he may prosecute election officials who knowingly process ballots “once we’ve informed them who the non-citizens are” and indicated the DOJ is working on “many more cases.”

Regarding the list sent to state and local officials, DOJ officials also said they have “high confidence” — not complete certainty — that the people on the federal government’s list are noncitizens.

“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens,” Trent McCotter, acting deputy attorney general, said Monday. “We're not perfect, and that's why we've asked California to cooperate with us.”

In a court declaration filed today, L.A. County Assistant Registrar Monica Flores said the DOJ’s list is “unreliable.” Analyzing a sample of 200 records, she said a majority are not active voters, and nearly 40% of the records indicate the individual was born in the U.S.

The L.A. County registrar of voters said officials here did not comply with the request to use the federal list and began coordinating with state officials — a point DOJ officials stressed on Monday, with McCotter saying this is “an emergency of their own [California’s] creation.”

Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who runs the school’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, disagreed.

“The federal government didn't produce its list of voters or its methodology to California until just a few days ago, so this is not an emergency of California's own making,” Hasen said. “It is not the federal government's job to decide who is on voting rolls. That is a job that is given to states.”

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment for this article beyond pointing to Essayli’s X social media feed.

What role will local election officials play?

In large part, Hasen and Levitt said officials will play the same role that they always have, even though more eyes will be on them. County election officials send out ballots, process and verify signatures, and reach out to voters if there are any outstanding issues. The registrar then has 13 days to report on ballots to the state, including provisional ballots and same-day registration ballots, and 30 days to finish counting them.

That said, Hasen said Essayli’s threat of possible criminal prosecution against election officials is “really dangerous” — even though he said these cases are also unlikely to succeed.

“We've got a threat of criminal prosecution against election administrators for not being aggressive enough in policing voting rolls to the Trump administration's liking,” Hasen said. “Even if they were negligent in how they policed their voting rolls, there's no criminal liability here.”

What should voters do?

Levitt, who previously worked on voting rights at the Justice Department, said he doesn’t think Trump’s DOJ is serious about the legal merits of their lawsuit against California.

“I can completely understand that people may be freaked out,” he said. “Part of what DOJ is doing is an attempt to freak people out.”

For their part, local officials have reassured voters that they should proceed to cast their ballots. In a statement, L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn called the DOJ’s actions “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”

Levitt recommended voting as early as possible to give voters time to check their registration and resolve any issues. If you have concerns, he recommended visiting an early voting center in person.

Hasen encouraged voters to double-check the status of their ballots to ensure they’ve been processed and counted.

“We have very good ballot tracking,” Hasen said. “California is not going to simply start throwing out ballots from people who are on an unvetted federal list of supposed noncitizen voters.”

What’s the future of this lawsuit?

Hasen and Levitt said the legal problems with the federal government’s arguments can be traced back to federal law and the Constitution.

“The Constitution gives states the power to run elections subject to Congress passing laws that can override that,” Hasen said. “There's no congressional override that would give the federal government the authority to do this.”

That makes the DOJ’s case unlikely to succeed, the professors agreed.

“It's possible that a court might not even really deal with it at all,” Levitt said.

What about the people accused of voting fraud?

The charges announced this week against 28 people accused of registering or voting as noncitizens, however, may be more successful, depending on the evidence presented in each case.

“Isolated cases of alleged voter fraud occur in red and blue states alike, and they should be prosecuted wherever they occur,” a spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.

But Bonta noted that the 28 people charged represent 0.0001% of California’s registered voters. The percentage is about the same in L.A. County: The 12 L.A. County residents charged this week make up roughly 0.0002% of people on the voter rolls.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is preparing for possible “Super El Niño” storms that could damage schools and lead to closures, the district announced in a media release Tuesday.

District staff are clearing drains, trimming trees and checking roofs, windows and doors. LAUSD is also testing emergency equipment, including pumps and emergency lighting systems, and stocking supplies such as flashlights and drinking water.

“Preparing for severe weather starts well before the first raindrop,” Superintendent Andrés Chait said in a statement. “We can’t control the weather, but we can take steps now to protect our students and employees and help our schools stay ready.”

The district will monitor weather patterns using information from the National Weather Service and local emergency officials, it said.

LAUSD encouraged families to update their contact information to ensure they receive district calls, texts and emails. Families should also monitor weather alerts, follow emergency officials’ instructions, avoid flooded roads and review safe routes to and from school, according to the release.

“Preparing for a storm is a shared effort — from the crews maintaining school buildings to the principals reviewing emergency plans and the families making sure they can receive critical updates,” LAUSD said in the release. “By taking these steps before the rain begins, Los Angeles Unified is working to help students and employees stay safe and keep school communities as prepared as possible for the winter ahead.”

Southern California is likely in for a solid dose of rain this week, just days after heat and Santa Ana winds helped fuel several wildfires across the region.

Forecasters expect the bulk of the rain to roll into the Los Angeles basin Wednesday night and continue into Thursday morning, with a small chance of thunderstorms and hail.

The San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and coastal areas across L.A. and Orange counties could get around an inch over the next few days. Hills and mountains could get up to 3 inches.

“We could see some pretty high rain rates,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Wofford. “It's a good storm for this time of year — it's a little stronger than what we would see normally.”

The possibility of significant rain in the mountains raises concerns about flooding in areas recently burned in wildfires, particularly around the Bryson Fire burn scar near Malibu, which is only a few days old. Burn scars can’t absorb heavy rainfall and are susceptible to landslides.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood watch for the Santa Monica Mountains and surrounding communities from Wednesday afternoon through Thursday. That means heavy rain there could flood streets, creeks and rivers. The flood watch area includes both the Bryson Fire and Palisades Fire burn scars.

This will also be the first nontropical storm of the season, meaning it’s moving into the region from the north. Most storms that hit Southern California follow a similar path, especially during the winter, unlike the tropical storms that formed off the coast of Mexico and brought muggy weather to the region this summer.

Nontropical storms also bring cold air to the region. On Wednesday and Thursday, forecasters expect highs in the 60s and 70s. High elevations will be even cooler.