Unlocking Gridlock

Faced with the prospect of rapid growth and mounting gridlock, transportation officials plan to unleash a wave of highway and mass transit projects unlike anything the Los Angeles region has seen since the freeway building boom of the 1960s.

The MTA is crafting a new long-range transportation plan that envisions spending tens of billions on highway, street, subway, light rail and busway projects to keep Los Angeles County moving, albeit slowly, during the next 25 years.

The smorgasbord of projects will undoubtedly stir controversy and spark “not in my backyard” movements in neighborhoods where new transit or highway projects could be built.

But Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials say improvements to the region’s transit system are crucial to prevent the Los Angeles area from grinding to a near halt in the decades ahead.

“The more growth there is, the more congestion there will be,” said James de la Loza, the MTA’s chief planner. “We move so many places . . . it’s necessary to improve the whole system. . . . All transportation options need to be evaluated.”

The enormity of the challenge is driven home by projections that Los Angeles County’s population will leap by 3.5 million from about 9.6 million in 1998 to 13.1 million in 2025.

By then, the average speed on most area freeways during the peak morning commute is expected to drop from 34 mph to 20 mph or less.

Even with the massive expenditure of local, state and federal funds on new road projects, the region will see a hardening of the arteries on both freeways and streets.

To avoid a transportation crisis that seriously impairs mobility, the county’s auto-loving residents will have to drive alone less often, carpool more often, or take mass transit to and from work.

“If people want to continue driving strictly by themselves, you’re going to have a big problem,” said Robert Sassaman, director of the Caltrans district that encompasses Los Angeles and Ventura counties. “You can’t really build yourself out of congestion.”

MTA planners drew a stark picture of the future last week, presenting an overview of the agency’s emerging blueprint for new highway and transit projects. The MTA’s past efforts at a long-range plan have been wildly unrealistic, promising far more rail projects than the agency could afford.

While far from complete, the latest plan will offer a long list of highway and transit projects. The MTA board of directors will consider the package in January and the final plan will be forwarded to the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which must approve it.

The MTA plan is loaded with proposals to expand the rapid bus system begun last summer, to construct busways across the San Fernando Valley and along Wilshire Boulevard, and to build light rail lines from Union Station to Pasadena and the Eastside, with extensions of those lines possible in later years.

Extension of Subway to Westwood Studied

An extension of the Red Line subway beneath Wilshire Boulevard from Western Avenue to Century City, and perhaps as far as Westwood, is under consideration despite serious political and construction obstacles. So too is closing the embarrassing gap in the MTA’s Green Line, which stops short of Los Angeles International Airport.

“If we have alternatives” to the automobile, de la Loza said, “people will take those alternatives.”

Nevertheless, huge investments in new transit projects are expected to have only a limited impact on the way county residents get from home to work.

In 2025, planners expect that 72.9% of all trips to work will be by motorists traveling alone, 17.2% by carpools and 9.9% by mass transit. If that occurs, it will represent only a small decrease in motorists driving alone and a slight increase in the percentage of commuters using mass transit and carpools.

After investing upward of $7 billion in the Red Line subway and two light rail projects, there is likely to be growing pressure at MTA to focus more attention on highways--the backbone of the transportation system for most county residents.

To speed the movement of people rather than cars, construction is expected to continue on a vast network of carpool or high-occupancy vehicle lanes, including direct connections from freeway to freeway.

High-tech innovations also are in the works, including more so-called smart corridors on freeways and computer systems to monitor traffic on city streets and keep traffic lights green to speed the movement of buses.

Improvements also are anticipated for freeway interchanges and onramps and offramps where bottlenecks occur.

After decades of controversy, a bitterly fought extension of the Long Beach Freeway through South Pasadena is still alive in the preliminary MTA plan.

Elsewhere, rapid growth and continued sprawl will create demand for new highway projects, particularly in the north county, which includes the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

Fully one-fourth of all the population growth in the county during the next quarter-century is forecast for the north county. The area, which had an estimated population of 537,873 in 1998, could reach 1.4 million by 2025.

“It’s time to start talking about freeways,” said Hasan Ikhrata, manager of transportation planning for the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “We’re not going to do it by rapid bus and HOV lanes.”

Both Ikhrata and de la Loza said there will be a need to widen the Antelope Valley Freeway and expand Metrolink rail service into Los Angeles.

But Ikhrata said the region has to look at other creative solutions to its transportation problems, including double-decking some existing freeways and building a new route from the north county into the Los Angeles Basin.

That concept, involving a tunnel through the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pasadena area, is so speculative that key planners cannot pinpoint a route or the potential cost of such an ambitious project.

Another concept being floated involves drilling a tunnel beneath the Santa Monica Mountains to make way for a carpool and bus lane beneath the Sepulveda Pass.

Sassaman said he had not heard of that idea, although Caltrans is looking at options to place a high occupancy vehicle lane on the San Diego Freeway northbound from the Santa Monica Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. One option is a second deck on the freeway--like the combination carpool lane and busway above parts of the Harbor Freeway.

He said building a carpool lane on the Santa Monica Freeway between downtown Los Angeles and the Westside also poses quite a challenge.

The Santa Monica Freeway was the focus of a legendary battle in 1976 when former Gov. Jerry Brown’s transportation director, Adriana Gianturco, established a diamond lane for carpools.

She was forced to abandon the idea after a popular revolt by motorists angry at being consigned to the remaining lanes of the freeway. Even now, there is no carpool lane on the route, one of the most heavily traveled highways in the nation.

Sassaman said the state originally planned to build more freeways across Los Angeles, but environmental concerns, a shortage of money and the advent of “not in my backyard” citizen movements halted those plans. Many of the designated routes were eliminated by the Legislature.

Opposition Expected From Neighborhoods

Proposals to build highways and transit systems inevitably spark opposition, usually from neighborhoods that are heavily affected during and after construction.

A case in point is the Long Beach Freeway corridor, where residents of South Pasadena have fought for decades to stop highway builders from driving a concrete wedge through their community. Likewise, construction of the Metro Rail subway seriously disrupted businesses, particularly along Wilshire, Hollywood and Lankershim boulevards.

Even without building freeways, Sassaman said, it is still possible to make the existing system function better. Relatively inexpensive improvements to widen offramps and onramps can “fix pinch points” where traffic backs up.

He said the installation of more freeway surveillance cameras can mean a quicker response by tow trucks to the scene of an accident. Synchronized traffic signals on adjoining streets and more mass transit can make entire transportation corridors more efficient at moving people and traffic.

“Transit is starting to take a role in our commuting patterns,” the Caltrans official said. But he added that too many people he meets have never been on a bus or a train in Los Angeles.

After decades of unending sprawl, planners and transportation officials argue that there must be a closer connection between land use decisions and transportation improvements.

“We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to have more coordination of land use, growth and transportation,” de la Loza said.

The Los Angeles region’s transportation problems are complicated because of a multitude of travel patterns. “We don’t go from suburb to downtown,” he said.

Commuters drive everywhere: from the South Bay to the Westside, from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley, from Ventura County and the Antelope Valley to downtown Los Angeles.

Such complex patterns result, in part, from a serious imbalance between the amount of housing and the number of jobs in a given area. That imbalance forces commuters to travel long distances from home to work, a situation aggravated by the region’s sprawl.

Sassaman said livable communities tend to be those where people reside and work in the same area. He observed that transportation and land use are rarely linked in Los Angeles because local officials want to control development decisions, and transportation needs tend to be regional in scope.

Political Battle Lines Being Drawn

“Unless you tackle the transportation and land use issues, you’re not going to be able to accommodate growth,” Ikhrata said.

The master plan for the next 25 years is far from finished, but already the political battle lines are forming.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina expressed concern that too much of the future investment will take place in the suburbs, far from the inner city.

Molina told her colleagues on the MTA board last week that poor and transit-dependent residents are concentrated in the inner city, and that their needs are not being adequately addressed in the plan.

And in a preview of the political struggle that lies ahead, hundreds of bus riders turned out for a public hearing Saturday to protest the MTA’s plans to eliminate, consolidate or reroute nearly three dozen bus lines across the county.

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If You Think It’s Slow Now....

Even with a massive investment in new highway and transit projects, the MTA forecasts that rapid population growth will cause peak morning commute traffic to slow to less than 20 mph by 2025 on most major freeways in Los Angeles County. That represents a sharp drop from 34 mph today.

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2025 PROJECTED FREEWAY SPEEDS

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Source: MTA