Austrians Awed by Southland Transportation Problems

“This is completely strange for us,” said City Councilman Hans Brosch, after learning that 95% of Los Angeles’ traffic moves in private vehicles. His hometown is Vienna, Austria.

“Most people here have private houses and cars,” he said. “Europeans are accustomed from birth to using public transportation. There was a trend to private cars after World War II, but the emphasis now is on public transportation.”

Brosch and 17 other officials from Vienna were in Los Angeles for a long weekend on the first stop of a 10-day tour which includes San Diego and San Francisco to observe first hand how California cities handle traffic planning and control.

The touring Viennese made stops Friday at a construction site along the Century Freeway, the city’s Department of Transportation offices and at Parker Center where police officials provided statistics on Los Angeles traffic.

Blizzard of Statistics

As a matter of fact, the Viennese were deluged with a blizzard of statistics at each stop, but their questions indicated that they were not losing sight of the bigger traffic picture.

After Department of Transportation Assistant General Manager Ed Rowe explained how Los Angeles hopes to build parking garages on the periphery of downtown to ease congestion in the Central Business District, Kurt Schwarz, an engineer with the visiting delegation pointed out:

“We know these measures from our cities. All of these measures won’t erase the problem. They will only move the problems someplace else--to the periphery.”

When the subject turned to Metro Rail, Brosch said he thought it would be very difficult to build a subway in Los Angeles. “The distances here are so great you’d have to build at least 50 miles of subway to have any impact,” he said.

20 Miles of Subway

Vienna has about 20 miles of subway lines through the center of town, and two more are under construction. About a third of Vienna’s traffic is made up of public transportation, he said. Another third is by private cars, and a third simply walk or ride bicycles, he added.

Those options may not be practical for Los Angeles, he said, because “the size difference is so momentous. This place is awe inspiring. All of Austria has only about 7 million people.”

That population is roughly equal to Los Angeles County’s.

Vienna, with a population of 1.5 million, manages to survive with only 30 miles of freeways, and none of those go through the center of the city.

“Freeways are only on the outskirts of town,” said Brosch. “We can’t construct more in the city because the population is against it.”

Colombo Curiousity

Traffic was not the only thing on the Austrians’ minds, however. Heinz Scio, a public relations man traveling with the delegation, wanted to know if Los Angeles isn’t the home of Lt. Colombo, the Peter Falk character on a old television detective series.

When told that it is, he became more animated than during any of the recitations of traffic statistics. Now he could tell his friends that he had seen Lt. Colombo’s hometown, he said, “and we’re also going to San Francisco where we’ll see where ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ was made.”