10 Freeway Shutdown Left Many Facing Long Commutes Into Downtown LA

Angelenos described longer than usual commute times to downtown Los Angeles on Monday morning after fire early Saturday morning resulted in the shutting down of a portion of the 10 Freeway downtown between the East L.A. Interchange and Alameda Street.

That stretch of highway typically handles 300,000 vehicles a day, causing ripple effects throughout the region.

Debbie Briano runs the El Rancho Grande restaurant in downtown’s historic Olvera Street. She travels around 25 minutes every morning from Whittier along the 60 Freeway to the 10 Freeway to get to work. On Monday, her commute took about an hour.

“I'm worried about customers being able to get to us because a lot of them aren't going to want to have to deal with this traffic in order to come here,” she said. “And then our vendors are going to have a hard time getting here too as well.”

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One of her employees who lives in the Pico-Rivera area usually comes in at 10 a.m. after making deliveries along Alameda Street. However, on the first Monday after the fire, he hadn’t arrived by 10:42 a.m., still stuck in traffic.

“I'm assuming what normally would take him maybe 30 minutes to get stuff done, once he's in this area, will probably take him closer to an hour,” she said.

When working from home isn't an option

Mark Williams, who works in the legal field, travels from Manhattan Beach on the 110 freeway. On Monday, he says the freeway was a “parking lot” today.

“[On] a normal day I can usually get in under an hour or 45 minutes. Today was like an hour and 40 minutes,” he said. “The traffic was just insane coming up the 110 freeway, so it was very bad today.”

Telecommuting — which top city and state official advised doing if at all possible — is not always an option for his line of work and public transit from the South Bay isn’t either.

“The commuter express bus that comes up the 110 would have been sitting in the same traffic that I was, so would really not have helped, unfortunately,” he said.

With the holidays around the corner, Williams said, he hopes traffic would be lighter.

Downtown via Union Station

Jonaz Sayson made sure to leave Santa Ana early Monday morning for Union Station but not because of the freeway closure. He wanted to make sure he wouldn’t miss his noon bus to Las Vegas.

But the Uber ride he thought would take 45 minutes took a little over an hour.

Sayson said his Uber driver didn’t know about the closure and neither did he.

“The guy was already midway in the journey to here,” he said when his phone pinged with an alert.

Help commuting

• City of L.A. has information on alternate routes here.
• Metrolink is increasing service from Covina all the way to downtown.
• Mayor Karen Bass urged people to use traffic apps such as Waze and Google maps and said city officials are working with those apps to keep people off surface streets

Map of closure