Motorists make their way on the 405 freeway through the Sepulveda Pass in January 2026. Planners have long dreamed of a transit alternative to this longtime bottleneck.
Photographer: Jason Armond/Los Angeles TimesA Tunnel to Transform Los Angeles
The ambitious Sepulveda Transit Corridor project — an automated subway line underneath Bel Air — aims to do something rare in LA: Get people out of their cars.
Congestion on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles is so bad, it’s a joke. The state of the 405, as locals call it, was a frequent punchline on “The Californians,” the Saturday Night Live soap opera parody featuring vacuous Angelenos obsessed with driving directions and traffic conditions.
When those skits aired in the early 2010s, there was hope that help was on the way for the jammed freeway. In 2014, California’s Department of Transportation opened an additional lane in each direction on the section of the 405 over the Sepulveda Pass in the Santa Monica Mountains. The project was intended to provide relief to the commuters trekking from the bedroom communities of the San Fernando Valley to West LA.