Tomorrow’s Menu: Today’s Traffic Jam

Right now, during the holiday season, traffic in the South Bay is at its worst.

The San Diego Freeway becomes a giant still life. Arterial roads flow like frozen molasses. Cars need three traffic lights to get through some intersections. Parking places are impossible to find. Tempers flare.

Get used to it.

Soon, according to gloomy official projections, such traffic jams will be the norm in the South Bay.

Consider this nightmarish forecast by Ed Nahabedian, the Caltrans Cassandra who has repeatedly warned of impending traffic doom:

Rush-hour grid lock. Intersection after intersection clogged with cars. Four-way rage as lights turn green but no one can move. A cacophony of commuters cursing, horns honking, brakes screeching. Catatonia on the freeways. Bedlam in the neighborhoods.

“Complete collapse. . . . You haven’t seen anything yet,” warned Nahabedian, who is Caltrans’ traffic operations engineer for the South Bay.

Breakdown Predicted

“The holidays are an indication of what to expect as traffic increases because of development. This is a test to experience what will happen in a couple of years from now.”

At some intersections, he said, “we are already seeing grid lock” at rush hour year-round. “(The system) will break down by 1987.”

In city after city throughout the South Bay, planners are wrestling with traffic problems. They win few matches; they lose many.

The primary cause of the traffic upsurge is an explosion of real estate development, according to planners and transportation reports.

The boom, which stretches from Los Angeles International Airport to the Port of Los Angeles, poses the most fundamental dilemma for those trying to deal with traffic.

“Are we willing to kill off the golden goose?” asks James D. Ortner, the chief traffic analyst for the Automobile Club of Southern California. “You cannot have the best of both worlds. You cannot have development and no traffic.”

$3.7 Billion Spent

Developers have poured more than $3.7 billion into the South Bay in the last five years and the pace is accelerating.

Many a solution somehow becomes a problem.

For example, the $1.6-billion Century Freeway and a $500-million transitway on the Harbor Freeway are expected to relieve congestion when they open in September, 1993.

But those massive projects will soak up almost all available transportation funding for 10 years, Caltrans says, leaving little for other projects in the area. What remains affordable will not keep pace. “We are running out of our little bag of tricks,” said Torrance Transportation Director Arthur Horkay.

Another solution, the burgeoning van pool systems, have put more commuters in fewer vehicles, but at the same time their convenience has enabled people to live farther and farther away, spreading congestion to outlying counties with more affordable housing.

In some cities, such as Hermosa Beach, officials resist trying to ease traffic, arguing that making traffic flow more smoothly will not benefit city residents. In others, officials and residents complain that their neighbors’ traffic problems have spread, dumping traffic across the city limits.

“You could be a hero if you could solve it,” Hawthorne resident Don Breck told the City Council. He was complaining about commuters from neighboring El Segundo coursing through his Holly Glen neighborhood in an effort to avoid congested Rosecrans Avenue.

In response, Councilman Steve Andersen pointed up another aspect of the intractability of the problem: “There is a problem in adding lanes because you attract people.”

Congestion is everywhere in the South Bay--on the freeways, on the arterial routes, even in neighborhoods. Motorists cannot help running into it. State and local officials have reams of data on it.

On the San Diego and Harbor freeways, the two Interstate highways traversing the South Bay, the periods of congestion are growing longer and the average speed is getting slower, according to state figures that confirm what every commuter knows all too well.

State traffic engineers have a method of measuring delays: the time lost traveling below 40 miles per hour on freeways.

When engineers applied it to the San Diego Freeway in 1984, they estimated that commuters daily lost 1.1 million minutes. Northbound speeds in the morning were below 20 miles per hour for two to three hours each day between the freeway’s intersections with the Harbor Freeway and Manhattan Beach Boulevard. (Back in 1977, when state engineers measured speeds on the same section, they found cars moving faster, between 20 and 35 miles per hour at the busiest periods.)

The situation has turned this stretch of the freeway into an odd prospect for the morning motorist approaching it on Hawthorne Boulevard, where cars roll at a respectable 30 miles per hour between lights: Vehicles on the freeway at first seem frozen on the overpass. Closer to the highway, creeping movement--strangely out of sync, in slow motion--becomes apparent.

‘It’s Awful’

“Most of the time it is like a parking lot. God, it’s awful,” said Jack Pintar, a sales representative who drives frequently via the freeway from his home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula to El Segundo, the aerospace employment center.

Two proposed additional lanes will be created by re-striping the San Diego Freeway between the Marina Freeway and Artesia Boulevard at a cost of $11 million. Although no date has been set for re-striping to begin, the new lanes are expected to relieve congestion somewhat by 1989.

Widening the highway to the 12 lanes needed to deal with existing traffic flow would require extensive and expensive construction that state officials are not contemplating.

Congestion on the Harbor Freeway is worse, reaching the lowest designation invented by traffic engineers to describe traffic conditions. For more than three hours a day, cars crawl at less than 15 miles per hour on stretches of the South Bay’s segment of the Harbor Freeway, between San Pedro and Inglewood.

Often Made Worse

And bad as these freeway speed statistics are, they reflect traffic only on trouble-free days--when no accidents, disabled vehicles, lane closures or other factors interrupt the usual snail’s pace of rush-hour traffic.

Caltrans estimated in 1984 that trouble-free conditions on all freeways occur only about half the time. But that, too, is getting worse. Freeway rush-hour accidents in the South Bay increased 17.6% between 1983 and 1984, the latest reporting period, according to a computerized search of accident records performed for The Times by Caltrans.

The worst increase in accidents in the South Bay occurred on the San Diego Freeway during the afternoon rush hour. Accidents went from 120 in 1983 to 163 in 1984, an increase of 35.8%. The majority were rear-end collisions involving passenger cars in which drivers were not paying attention to stop-and-go traffic, according to the accident records.

The state highways in the South Bay face the same prospects as the freeways, according to state transportation planners. Traffic on almost all of them--Pacific Coast Highway, Artesia Boulevard, Hawthorne Boulevard, to name some of the most prominent--crawls at 15 miles per hour during morning and late afternoon peak periods.

Thirteen percent of the 1,517 miles of state highways throughout the county suffered congestion (traffic moving at less than 25 miles per hour) for more than an hour a day in 1984. State traffic engineers expect that to grow to 19%, 285 miles of congestion, by 1995.

Worst Intersections

In the South Bay, Nahabedian identified the worst intersections--officially measured as over capacity at rush hour--as the Pacific Coast Highway and Hawthorne Boulevard, Torrance Boulevard and Hawthorne, Aviation Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, Sepulveda Boulevard and Rosecrans Avenue, Imperial Highway and Sepulveda Boulevard and Artesia Boulevard at Prairie Avenue. Most other intersections along Hawthorne Boulevard between the Pacific Coast Highway and the San Diego Freeway and along the Pacific Coast Highway between Los Angeles International Airport and the Harbor Freeway have been measured as close to overload, the traffic engineer said.

Traffic increases at some have been dramatic.

At the intersection of Hawthorne and Torrance boulevards, for example, state engineers measured traffic between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., on a midweek day in June, 1984, and counted 1,200 cars moving east and the same number moving west. One year later, 1,515 cars were traveling east, a 25% increase, and 1,580 cars were going west, an increase of 30%.

On Sepulveda Boulevard at Los Angeles International Airport, northbound evening rush-hour traffic increased 12% between 1984 and 1985; the southbound increase was 15%.

Streets More Crowded

Smaller city streets and neighborhoods are also becoming more crowded with cars, particularly where--as in Hawthorne and Lawndale--new apartment construction has gone up in neighborhoods formerly occupied by duplexes or single-family homes, or where--as in the beach cities--commuters desperately seek alternatives to clogged arterial routes.

“If we get any more cars on our street,” one resident of Roselle Avenue told the Hawthorne Planning Commission recently, “we might as well live on the Harbor Freeway.” Several apartment houses are under construction on the street.

In Hermosa Beach, Caltrans counted 12,000 cars a day driving down Gould Avenue, a street of single-family homes that gets overflow commuter traffic coming off Artesia Boulevard headed for the Pacific Coast Highway.

“That kind of traffic--people not living in Hermosa Beach just trying to get through here--doesn’t have to be here,” Jim Lissner, who lives on the street, said in an interview.

Torrance officials report a 50% increase in the number of miles driven on city streets between 1966 and 1985. The estimate for 1985 is 1.2 billion miles.

“This,” noted Horkay, “is greater than the distance to Saturn, or 50,000 times around the world.”

If traffic jams are a sign of good times, then, let it be noted, these are good times for the South Bay. Very good times indeed.

“The South Bay is one of the hottest development areas, especially with the growth of the airport and the port. A lot of firms want to locate between the two,” said Ortner of the automobile association.

“You have a growing employment base and it is diversifying. At the same time, you have the growth of the commercial sector. The median income is rising and people have more money and other people will find ways for them to spend it.

“You have all the makings of traffic. Congestion is a sign of prosperity.”

The area near the airport--bordered by the San Diego Freeway, Rosecrans Avenue, Venice Boulevard and the Pacific Ocean--was the subject of a 1984 traffic study, widely considered authoritative, that was conducted by the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG). If found that the study area is the scene of remarkable growth.

Aerospace Boom

In El Segundo alone since 1980, new construction for the aerospace industry boomed, reaching $890 million in construction costs in the 5.5-square-mile city. Employers added 4.1 million square feet of office space in four years, and another 1.9 million square feet is planned in two massive projects. Employment in El Segundo, according to city Planning Department figures, jumped by 10,000 in two years, reaching 75,000 in 1982.

Hughes Aircraft Co., the largest employer in El Segundo, opened a 4.9-million-square-foot building for its Electro-Optical and Data Systems Group in April, 1981. Hughes has a total of 8.2 million square feet of floor area in its El Segundo facilities. Currently, 31,000 work there, up 8,200 from four years ago.

For the entire study area, SCAG analysts reviewed each proposed project, calculated the number of jobs they would generate and came up with a 48% employment increase in just seven years. Employment, 186,830 in 1980, is projected to be 276,712 in 1987--an addition of almost 90,000 jobs.

That many new people going back and forth to work create a lot of traffic. The number of trips into the area is expected to increase 46% between 1980 and 1987.

The SCAG analysts also examined traffic flow road by road. The news is not good.

Traffic to Increase

Imperial Highway between the San Diego Freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard will see an increase of 86% in traffic volume, comparing 1980 with 1987, according to the SCAG projections. An increase of 60% is forecast for Compton Boulevard between the San Diego Freeway and Aviation Boulevard. The increase on Rosecrans Avenue between the San Diego Freeway and Aviation Boulevard will be 49%. On Century Boulevard between the San Diego Freeway and the airport, it will be 45%.

Only La Cienega Boulevard, from the San Diego Freeway to Imperial Highway, among the 17 roads analyzed showed a significant decrease--20%. Flow along La Cienega would be eased, according to the study, because rush-hour parking restrictions would open another lane on a parallel street.

Looking at the entire road system in the study area, SCAG analysts found that, in 1980, peak-period traffic crawled at an average speed of less than 10 miles per hour along 16.9 miles of the major highways and freeways. Along an additional 27.9 miles, traffic was not quite so bad, flowing at an average speed of less than 15 miles per hour. Adding the two together, the study concluded that the major roads were badly congested--operating at less than 15 miles per hour during peak periods--for 25% of their length in 1980.

By 1987, overall congestion in the study area will be much worse, according to the SCAG projection.

By then, the zone of 10 miles per hour or less will more than double in length to 35.2 miles, and the zone where the average speed is 15 miles per hour or less will elongate 18% to 32.9 miles. Altogether, 35% of the length of the major roads will be congested.

Development to Continue

No relief is in sight from the pressure of development in the area. About 41 million square feet of new development is on the drawing boards for completion by the year 2000.

SCAG is collecting data now for an update to see if its projections are on target for the area. But in the case of one intersection, Sepulveda and Century boulevards, “traffic is increasing faster than we predicted,” said Bijan Yarjani, SCAG project manager for the study.

No one has conducted a detailed study that includes the entire South Bay, but available statistics indicate a similar picture of good times and bad traffic. South Bay residents have put a lot more money in their pockets during the last five years--more than enough even to beat inflation, enough to widen the gap between the comparatively well-paid South Bay and many parts of Los Angeles County.

The combined income of South Bay residents rose 51%, from $7 billion to $10.4 billion. If the income had been divided equally among every man, woman and child in the South Bay, everyone would have gotten $9,930 in 1980. In 1985, the individual share would have been $14,275, an increase of 44% that outpaced a 27% rise in the Los Angeles consumer price index.

The South Bay is doing better than the rest of Los Angeles County: More precisely, the 1980 per-capita income in the South Bay was 21.7% higher than the per-capita income in the rest of the county. By 1985, despite substantial growth in the rest of the county, the South Bay per-capita figure was 24.8% higher.

Population Increased

Population grew 4.5% between 1980 and 1985 in an area that was already more than three times denser than the rest of the county.

Construction hot spots, although not quite as concentrated as in El Segundo, dot the rest of the South Bay map. Building overall in the area in the last five years was valued at more than $3.7 billion, according to conservative estimates compiled by the Los Angeles County assessor’s office and Security Pacific Bank.

In Hawthorne, a residential building boom is under way. The city has issued building permits at a breakneck pace, surpassing by August its previous record for building construction in an entire year.

Although the dollar amounts on 1985 permits issued through Dec. 17 are a not-inconsiderable $84.5 million in construction costs, the intensity of the boom emerges more clearly with a look at the number of residential units.

The Hawthorne City Hall has issued permits in 1985 for 1,253 residential units. This is equal to 71% of the annual average for all South Bay cities combined during the previous five years. And permits for an additional 1,300 units are stacked up in City Hall, awaiting processing. Construction costs for the backlog are $59 million.

Hotel Planned

In Hawthorne’s future is a $200-million redevelopment project near the intersection of Rosecrans Avenue and Aviation Boulevard. It will add 1 million square feet divided among a hotel, offices, retail shops and restaurants. The first phase is expected to open in 1990.

In Torrance, the city is also posting a record year for building permits. Permits for construction worth $171.4 million were issued through November--79% more than in 1984. The boom in Torrance is diversified, according to an official list of major projects that have just been completed, are under construction or are in planning stages. The list encompasses 2,456 residential units, 4 million square feet of commercial construction and 1.1 million square feet of industrial buildings. The city Planning Department estimates construction costs of projects on the list at more than $165 million.

SCAG’s sophisticated computer analysis that provides street-by-street projections is not available for the South Bay as a whole, but Nahabedian has computed by hand what the new construction will mean for the South Bay in general.

The idea behind the estimation is a simple one: It is based on the observation that people will drive to and away from every new building--on the way home, to work or to shop. Traffic surveys of different types of construction enable analysts to predict how much traffic a particular building will generate: so many trips per thousand square feet of commercial floor space; so many for industrial; so many for each unit of residential construction.

Nahabedian estimates that by some time in 1987, an additional 630,000 trips a day will either start or stop in the South Bay.

“Where are they going to go?” he asks. “Hey, we have a problem. Let’s alert the public before the sky falls on our heads.”