Construction, Maintenance Costs to Rise : More Jammed Roads Seen for State

California’s overcrowded highways will grow more congested for the rest of this century and paralyzing traffic delays will continue to spread from urban centers to the suburbs, top state transportation officials say.

The state faces such a huge increase in highway traffic, the experts add, that even doubling the current 9-cents-per-gallon state gasoline tax won’t provide enough extra construction dollars to hold congestion down to current levels.

In a conference here of 75 highway and mass transit planners and executives from federal, state, regional, local government and private agencies, there was unanimous agreement that future California highways will be more crowded and more expensive to build and maintain.

Because of astronomical land and construction costs, California cannot realistically hope to add additional miles to its freeway and highway system at the same rate that the number of drivers and vehicles will increase, they said.

The inevitable results, they said, will be longer commutes, more congestion and increased pressure for car pools and mass transit. Other alternatives discussed in the unique seminar of the state’s top transportation officials ranged from narrower freeway lanes to development fees against employers who create new commuters by creating new jobs.

“The money is not there. Things are going to get worse, no matter what we do,” said Angus MacDonald, a longtime financing consultant to the California Transportation Commission.

“We can no longer hope to spend and build our way out of our transportation problems,” adds Hugh Fitzpatrick, a former deputy director of finance for the Transportation Commission.

“Even if we had an 11-cent gas tax increase today that gave us an additional $13 billion over the next 10 years, the performance of our existing transportation system would continue to get worse, not better,” continued Fitzpatrick, now director of transportation for the Irvine Company in Orange County.

“We don’t even talk about getting rid of congestion anymore. We just have to plan on reducing the number of hours it will last,” said Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

“Population growth and increasing highway use will make future service levels much worse unless we can dramatically increase the ratio of passengers to vehicles,” added Leo Trombatore, director of Caltrans, the state’s $2.9-billion-a-year Department of Transportation.

“New roads alone will not answer all future capacity demands. California must operate the existing system more efficiently,” Trombatore added. “The key is increasing the ratio of passengers to vehicles. Therefore, the state must look ahead to providing more high-occupancy vehicle lane incentives for buses and cars.”

Already, he said, 21% of California’s 15,000 miles of state highways carry more traffic than they were designed to serve, and 39% of the $130-billion state highway system is classified in need of repair, ranging from minor maintenance to multimillion-dollar rebuilding projects.

The 15,000 miles of roads and freeways maintained by the state are actually only 8.5% of California’s total street and highway network, but they account for 52% of the estimated 190 billion miles that California’s 17 million motorists drive annually.

“As the state’s population continues to climb, future highway travel in California will mirror that growth. It’s projected that some 30 million people will be living here by the end of the century (about a 15% increase),” Trombatore told the conference.

By then, Trombatore’s department estimates, the average speed on Los Angeles area freeways will be down from the current average of 38 m.p.h. to 17 m.p.h. That compares to averages of 6 m.p.h. to 9 m.p.h. on New York City streets.

“Not only will there be more people, there will be a larger concentration of drivers aged 35 to 49, the age group which drives the most. This means California drivers will log more than 130 billion miles annually (on state highways) by 1995, an increase of about 30%,” he said.

On the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, traffic each way is expected to increase in the next 15 years from the current 99,000 daily commuters to 157,000. At the same time, ridership under the bay on BART trains is expected to increase from the current 43,000 daily each way to 101,000 each way.

In the Los Angeles area, the excess of traffic demand over capacity of the region’s freeways is expected to increase from a current average of 21% to 50%, and to a paralyzing 150% in the Santa Ana Freeway traffic corridor.

To accommodate that growth, Trombatore’s agency is earmarking most of new construction dollars for special bus and car pool lanes.

The state is also spending more money on new high technology traffic surveillance and accident detection equipment and other modern equipment aimed at maximizing traffic flows during peak hours such as computerized traffic monitors and electronic highway signs with changeable messages controlled by central traffic control centers.

The transportation planners also stressed the need for more businesses to adopt “flex time” for as many workers as feasible and to shift more commuters and business deliveries away from peak traffic hours.

Many of those traffic strategies, ranging from the high technology traffic monitoring systems to night deliveries and a very prosaic expanded bus fleet and more car pools, were tested during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and were collectively rated a spectacular success.