Caltrans District 7

instead of spending money on your offices you should go out and make it easier for motorists trying to find these freeway entrances. For example you have a sign on Century Blvd. «110 Freeway south.» you know what that is? Driving along the freeway until you get to Imperial Hwy. And guess what. doing that makes you miss the 105 freeway… then you have to back track all the way over to… that was the start of my adventure on the freeway today where what should have been a 50 mile round trip turned into 100 miles! so go fix those signs.

Your billion dollar office building is pretty. In mean time I have to live with your other properties as my view. The one you won’t clean up. The one you neglect. It doesn’t look pretty and since no one is checking up on it thieves and like kinds are creating havoc in my back yard. Why don’t I contact you? I had management company submit forms but no results yet. Check out my view. I will share my photos. I have been living with it for years. If you can’t take care of it why not give it away. The current residents with this ugly view will do a good job maintaining it. It will be their responsibility to clean up. Too greedy are you? Then clean up the mess please!!!

GOOD POLICY, BAD ENFORCEMENT.
In Caltrans there are many good policies such as zero tolerance of discrimination and harassment, training & rotation, upward mobility, and so on. The bottom line is who is going to enforce the good policies?
Here is an example. The individual Development Plan (IDP) should be provided to each employee every year. The first page is Evaluation from supervisor. The second page is Performance Objectives and Plans for Achieving Objective for staff to fill out. It is a good policy. However I have worked with Caltrans 15 years and I only got one IDP. That only IDP was done by supervisor only and he did not follow instructions to let me fill out second page. Nobody enforce supervisor to do it in a correct way.
Another example is Staff Expectations. It should be signed by both supervisor and staff. It emphasized cooperation, fairness, honesty, respect, and directors’ policies such as Equal Employment Opportunity, Discrimination and Harassment and so on. In reality I am the victim of Staff Expectations. I believed those expectations so I got fired in year 2005 and I stayed home for six months. Caltrans then did not follow court order to process reinstatement, but simply cancelled termination. When I emailed my supervisor about discrimination and harassment in the office, he sent me an email in the middle of the night that he deleted my email without reading it. Expectations is for employee only not for employer.
NO ENFORCEMENT, NO POLICY.

Yes cal trans is a necessary agency but thier scheduling of sweeping should not be performed during peak hours but rather between 10pm and 5am.
But my big gripe is when a major project is underway on any freeway the lack and monitoring of Detour signs is unbelievable, where are the inspectors and personnel responsible for monitoring this activity?

Are people seriously rating CalTrans based on the architecture of their building?
CalTrans is a necessary and somewhat effective highway maintenance organization in California. They work very hard to keep the highways and freeways in California clean and functional. Their brightly colored white and orange vehicles are nearly impossible to miss and the staff I’ve encountered have been very friendly and helpful.
I do ding them a couple stars for two reasons. One — trying to get in contact with them to report a problem can be difficult through their website. Two — on several occasions I’ve encountered routine landscaping or sweeper train activity during rush hour in Southern California. This has resulted in worse traffic congestion than normal. Supervisors need to work harder to schedule work which will impact traffic to off-​peak hours only.

The building is intriguing, the people inside it are not.

This building is awesome! Thom Mayne designed CalTrans building!
Pros: Gorgeous, imposing architecture. Love the impressions of the wood grain from the concrete forms that you can see on the 1^st Street side of the building. Provides a great bit of «open space» in the middle of downtown — lots of benches and places to sit (make calls, smoke a cig, re-​collect your thoughts, prep for a meeting) in the courtyard that faces Main Street. Pretty tasty cafeteria on the first floor. Its surprisingly good. Great tuna melts and fries!
Cons: Some of the meeting rooms are way too cold! Turn down the thermostat, please! The service in the cafeteria could be more friendly AND they sometimes run out of food by 3:30 PM. Sometimes you have been stuck in City Hall all day and this is the only place to grab a sandwich before your next destination but they’ve run out of food! Boo!

Say Hello to Los Angeles’s Death Star. This death fortress is one of the coolest looking buildings in LA and has no ties to the army. It’s the Caltrans headquarters. Who knew caltrans needed a death fortress. It’s amazing to see up close or while walking through Little Tokyo.
from the blog of jamesstata
From the outside, this building hulks and humiliates with its scale
It’s a towering, gray block of a building that says, «This is the bureaucracy of transportation, and you aren’t welcome here.» (Note: If you aren’t a Californian, Caltrans is the state transportation agency.)
Yea this massive building is for the people who work on our freeways. It’s crazy. It would be nice if the rest of the area looked as cool as that building or that the building was actually used for a meaningful purpose, not some dumb beaurcrats place to go to work.
Oh no Cal trans has grown to powerful and will destroy us!