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By Jorge Casuso
July 31 -- When civic
leaders ponder answers to LA’s
legendary gridlock, they’d
best heed the warnings of the
past -- every solution implemented
over the past 125 years has
failed to make a dent, a traffic
specialist warned at a forum
in Santa Monica last week.
The good news is that reducing
traffic by only 5 to 10 percent
would make driving across the
nation’s second-largest
city a smooth ride, according
to the panelists at “Gridlock
in Los Angeles: Getting Past
the Standstill,” a forum
sponsored by RAND on Thursday.
The bad news is that the only
real solutions -- changing the
behavior of motorists voluntarily
or through coercion or punitive
measures -- will be difficult,
if not politically suicidal,
the experts warned.
“The question of what
we do about congestion is a
political question,” said
Martin Wachs, director of RAND’s
Transportation,
Space and Technology Program.
“The bottom line is that
we all want traffic congestion
to be reduced, but we don’t
want to change our behavior
or pay more.”
“Traffic is a confounding
problem, and there is no simple
answer, but there are some simple
answers,” said Zev Yaroslavsky,
chairman of the LA County Board
of Supervisors and a panelist
at the forum. “You have
to have the courage to try simple
solutions.”
One simple answer, said Yaroslavsky,
is his proposal to turn Pico
and Olympic boulevards into
one-way streets, a proposal
that he said is being studied
to death.
Another simple solution, said
Richard Katz, a former State
legislator and a member of the
Governing Board of the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority (MTA),
would be to build a 710 connector
through Pasadena, “an
old idea” that’s
been around “since we
were in the womb."
Reducing congestion, Katz agreed,
“will take political will
and all of you to do something
different.”
A boom in population and commerce,
an increasing volume of trucks,
an underdeveloped public transit
system, a thriving tourism industry
and a dearth of new roads all
contribute to gridlock, Wachs
said.
“Traffic congestion is
a by-product of economic and
social success,” said
Wachs, who has authored four
books and 160 articles on the
topic and related issues. “People
are shopping more, working more,
going to college more.
“If you want to escape
traffic congestion in LA, you
can move to Duluth,” he
told the crowd of some 100 Angelenos,
almost none of them born in
the area.
Building new roads, rail lines,
and freeways or adding fleets
of buses have never solved the
problem, Wachs said. To illustrate
his point, Wachs showed photos
of Downtown streets gridlocked
with horse-drawn carriages,
red-line cars, automobiles and
buses.
Some answers that could work
-- such as creating car-free
zones, banning on-street parking
or quintupling parking rates
-- are untenable, Wachs said.
But others, in combination,
could make a major dent on a
problem that is having emotional
and economic impacts on those
stuck behind the wheel, Wachs
said.
Potential answers include:
- Taking full advantage of
technology, including computerized
signals, radio and cell phones,
- Building new capacity,
- Adding transit improvements,
but also “not falling
into the trap” of thinking
that building the subway to
the sea will alleviate congestion,
- Encouraging staggered work
and school hours,
- Moving goods at night,
and
- Using coercion to get drivers
to travel at different hours.
“We need to reduce traffic,
but not by a lot to make the
system run smoothly,”
Wachs said.
Traffic could be significantly
reduced if 10 to 20 percent
if those driving alone carpool,
if motorists are charged when
they enter congested areas or
if pay lanes are layered above
freeways, with the revenue generated
used to finance public transit,
Wachs said.
“Some include some pain
to get some gain,” he
cautioned.
Other proposals that could
work, but will take political
will, include increasing the
number of passengers required
to use car pool lanes from two
to three, Katz said. The lanes
could also function as toll
lanes for those who want to
move more quickly.
Another idea being floated
is “pricing congestion,”
which requires motorists to
pay a fee when entering congested
areas, Katz said.
The plan -- which has been
tried in large European cities
-- would be difficult to implement
in sprawling Los Angeles, experts
warned.
“I wouldn’t put
all my eggs in the pricing congestion
basket,” Yaroslavsky said.
Yaroslavsky -- who blamed much
of the region’s traffic
woes on “unbridled”
development - warned it will
be difficult to legislate the
changes in behavior required
to alleviate congestion.
“There’s political
courage and political suicide,”
concluded Yaroslavsky, who served
on the LA City Council for nearly
two decades, before being elected
to the Board of Supervisors
in 1994.
“If you take away something
people feel they’re entitled
to, you’re tilting at
windmills,” he said.
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