Los Angeles Is Building an e-Highway

The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach bring in roughly 40 percent of the goods shipped to the United States. Once there, the first leg of their journey to warehouses and stores and cities across the country is a 20-mile stretch of roadway between the ports and downtown L.A. known as the Alameda Corridor, used almost exclusively by large trucks hauling goods between the ports and various freight rail links. The corridor's high concentration of diesel-truck traffic has created a similarly high concentration of pollution in the surrounding areas, causing health and air-quality concerns for nearby residents and the region as a whole.

But a new road design project dubbed the e-highway is aiming to reduce and maybe even eliminate the pollution problems caused by all this truck traffic. The experimental system is being built along a mile of the corridor to test how highly polluting diesel truck traffic could instead run on emission-free electric power. If successful, this demonstration could offer a solution to pollution-related problems along the Alameda Corridor and other high-traffic roadways all over the world.