The soaring ramps in the stack interchanges favored by Caltrans often provide stunning views.
Caltrans (full name: California Department of Transportation) is a government agency in the U.S. state of California. Its mission is to maintain, repair, and improve roads and highways throughout the state. Caltrans is also involved with the improvement of public transportation systems in California.
For administrative purposes, Caltrans has divided the state of California into districts supervised by district offices. Most districts cover multiple counties; Orange County is the only county with its own dedicated district office. The most important districts are District 4 (San Francisco Bay Area) and District 7 (Los Angeles and Ventura counties).
Caltrans has a reputation for being both innovative and stubbornly idiosyncratic. It has frequently been criticized for proposing and often constructing ugly bridges and has several times been forced to redesign such structures in response to public outcry. It has long experimented with freeway-to-freeway stack United States to number its freeway exits, and one of the last to switch from dark green "button copy" signs to bright green reflective signs. In the 1990s, Caltrans aggressively added carpool lanes on freeways to reduce traffic congestion.
Although state highways generally adhere to consistent minimum design standards throughout much of the state, there is a strange schism between the Northern and Southern California district offices. Northern California carpool lanes are always directly adjacent to mainline traffic lanes and are restricted to carpools only during rush hour, while Southern California carpool lanes are always separated from mainline lanes (except at designated entrance/exit areas) and are restricted at all times.
Over the last several decades Caltrans has supervised extensive seismic retrofitting of structures throughout California, in addition to creating far more stringent design criteria for new constrution.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is committed to implementing stormwater management practices to reduce pollutants in highway runoff as required by applicable legislation and regulations.
Caltrans' overall strategy for complying with its proposed statewide National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stormwater permit and its corresponding Storm Water Management Plan (SWMP) depends on continuous improvement and refinement of its stormwater management program.
Caltrans personnel steering the program development are IECA members from Headquarters, all under the direction of Steve Borroum, environmental engineering office chief.
Caltrans values the engineers, wants to hire them permanently and says it is a colossal waste of money to let veteran professionals go after investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in training and costs to process their temporary visas.
Caltrans is the United States' largest state transportation department, with about 8,500 engineers, but it is short 500 engineers even before a predicted expansion of projects in the future.
Caltrans has concluded that if it were to begin that screening process, it would be forced to hire any minimally qualified U.S. applicant who had passed a California state exam and was listed on a state civil service list.
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