Being Fuelish

What can $100,000 buy these days? A couple of fancy automobiles, a very good boat, an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood, a thousand or more excellent meals or one of those changeable message signs on the freeway that alert motorists in a tie-up to “Heavy Traffic Ahead.”

In yet another example of upward failure, those signs were such a flop on the Santa Monica Freeway that Caltrans has installed 20 more of them over the last year on freeways all over town at a cost of more than $2 million. To hear Caltrans tell it, the signs on the Santa Monica Freeway reduced accidents by 17%. The agency has a study by UCLA that says so. It was probably the signs that said “Don’t Be Fuelish, Be Car-Poolish” that did the trick. Or the unforgettable “Take the Train,” which provoked the universal response, “What train?”

The current Caltrans administration puts the blame for those gems on the previous administration, and promises that the new signs will be used only for traffic information--and even then only for unusual conditions. If a freeway is jammed every night at 5:30, they won’t bother telling you that. Nor will they give you information that you can’t do anything about. According to Caltrans, the new batch of signs--which have yet to be used regularly, though they have been in place for months--have been strategically located before major freeway interchanges so that motorists can plan alternative routes if there is an accident ahead.

As we recall, the Santa Monica Freeway signs were heralded a decade ago as the greatest advance in transportation since rubber tires, and second only to the automatic starter in benefits to the average driver. So we remain dubious about the advantages of putting up more. We would have been just as happy to see the ones already up taken down and junked. Everybody’s entitled to make mistakes, but, at $100,000 a copy, compounding the error is more than a little bit fuelish.