Road Warriors : L.A.’s Planners in Combat With Traffic

“Bruuuuuce!” The cry goes up from a section of the crowded stadium. Within seconds, thousands have joined in. “Bruuuuuuce!” they chant in unison. “Bruuuuuuuuce!”

Springsteen is in town. More than 80,000 ecstatic fans are packed into Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on this cloudy Monday night, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. On stage, their hero belts out “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Dancing in the Dark” and all the other hit songs they came to hear. The concert has been going for almost three hours, but the crowd’s rapture shows no signs of waning--thousands are up out of their seats and dancing, pausing only to listen reverently as the Boss, between songs, makes appeals for action against world hunger.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, five levels underground in the basement of Los Angeles City Hall East, several engineers with the city’s Department of Transportation are grouped around two 25-inch computer screens. As they work the keyboards, multicolored images of familiar intersections flash into view--Figueroa and Exposition, 39th and Vermont. Suddenly a voice crackles over a nearby speaker.

“ATSAC Center, the concert appears to be over,” the voice says. It’s traffic engineer Anson Nordby, radioing from a helicopter as it circles several hundred feet above the Coliseum. “Please stand by.”

For the next hour, Nordby and his colleagues will employ the city’s $7-million, state-of-the-art computerized traffic signal system--dubbed ATSAC, for Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control--to speed the Springsteen fans home. As the cars pour onto the streets, 400 magnetic loop detectors buried under 118 Coliseum-area intersections begin transmitting data to the ATSAC computer through miles of hair-thin fiber-optics cables. The computer analyzes the data and adjusts the timing of the signals at key intersections according to the volume of traffic. Occasionally, when an intersection becomes particularly congested, the engineers will override the computer and, in an effort to “flush out” the traffic, leave a signal on green for several minutes at a time.

ATSAC is a high-tech new addition to the growing arsenal that transportation planners are drawing upon in what is being billed as a coordinated, multi-agency assault on traffic congestion. The system was installed at intersections in the vicinity of the Coliseum just before the 1984 Olympic Games, and officials have credited it with helping to prevent the area from being overrun by Olympian traffic jams. Construction crews will soon begin installing ATSAC at 162 intersections in Los Angeles’ central business district, an area bounded roughly by the Santa Monica, Harbor and Hollywood freeways and west of San Pedro Street. The work should be completed by early 1987.

Although computerized control of traffic signals is considered experimental, officials say preliminary studies have indicated that ATSAC can have a noticeable impact on congestion. One hour after the Springsteen concert ended, for example, almost all the traffic had left the area. “It was smooth sailing all the way,” says L.A. architect Arlene Feldman, an avid Boss fan. “We had no problem at all getting in and out.”

According to Nordby, this contrasts dramatically with pre-ATSAC experiences. “We had a Rolling Stones concert a couple of years ago,” he says. “Two hours after it ended, there were still cars trying to get out of the parking lot.”

Traffic, to many Los Angeles residents, seems much like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything. In fact, though, in recent years nearly every traffic-mitigation proposal--from Metro Rail to installing the simplest residential traffic signal--has generated considerable controversy. To a large extent, the debates over how best to deal with Los Angeles’ worsening traffic reflect differing visions of the city’s future. Most of the projections relied upon by transportation planners assume that commercial and residential construction will continue at the current booming pace. And outside of enacting occasional limited building moratoriums, Mayor Tom Bradley and most members of the Los Angeles City Council remain strongly pro-development.

In the past, critics who questioned the wisdom of uncontrolled development were often accused of harboring a “no-growth” philosophy. But some, such as Martin Wachs, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, accuse developers of wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. “It’s always portrayed that the limiting of development represents government intervention to restrict . . . the rights of private landholders to reap the benefits of their own property, and therefore it’s in some sense contrary to the free enterprise system,” Wachs says. “On the other hand, the very same people who would criticize restrictions on development . . . have no hesitation to call upon ‘big government’ to provide them with Metro Rail systems, freeway expansion and so forth.”

More recently, however, many officials have come to agree that there are limits on how many cars our streets and freeways can handle. One new approach being tried throughout the area is to finance traffic-mitigation measures through fees assessed on developers before a project is approved. Last September, the L.A. City Council unanimously approved the Coastal Corridor Transportation Plan, an ordinance sponsored by Councilwoman Pat Russell that will assess all new developments in the Venice, Westchester and Los Angeles International Airport area a fee of $2,010 for each car that completion of the development is projected to put on the road during the evening rush hour. Donald R. Howery, the city Transportation Department’s general manager, estimates that the plan will raise about $9 million per year, or about 40% of the cost of the traffic improvements proposed for that area.

According to City of Los Angeles planner David Gay, who headed up the drafting of the plan, the city is telling developers, “build anything you want to build, but take care of the traffic.” Even so, several community groups in the coastal region believe there still will be more new traffic congestion than the area can handle. One resident branded the ordinance a “pay-to-plunder plan,” and Patrick McCartney of the Venice Town Council says that “the sad fact is that, despite all the wonderful road widenings that the fee will permit, traffic is expected to get worse.”

Planners fear that many areas of Los Angeles--especially the central business district--will be struck by the same type of blight that Manhattan has fallen prey to: the dreaded gridlock, or, in the parlance of traffic engineers, “Level F,” which is defined by the National Research Council’s Highway Capacity Manual as “jammed conditions . . . backed-up traffic prevents a movement through intersections.”

To many of those who try to drive in or out of downtown during peak hours, it may seem that the Armageddon of snarled traffic has already arrived. Yet according to L.A. Department of Transportation assistant general manager Ed Rowe, only a few downtown intersections ever reach Level F and even then not on a consistent, daily basis: 5th and Figueroa, 7th and Broadway, and Grand and Temple. In other words, we still have a long way to go to catch up with Manhattan, where intersections throughout mid-town are gridlocked for at least part of each weekday.

“I don’t think the traffic problems of Los Angeles are nearly as serious as those in many of the older cities in the East and many cities abroad,” says Martin Wachs. “When colleagues of mine from other cities come here . . . and we go downtown, they shrug and ask, ‘Where’s all the traffic?’ ”

But according to projections by transportation planners, the traffic onslaught is on its way, with a vengeance. By the early 1990s, downtown development will add an estimated 27 million square feet of building space to the central business district--the equivalent of four Century Cities. About 80,000 new employees will join the ranks of the 240,000 already working there, bringing with them 13,000 more automobiles and the need for 1,000 more buses.

Moreover, according to Howery, these estimates do not take into account the building explosion just west of the Harbor Freeway, which according to one projection will add another 8 1/2 million square feet of development over the next several years. “There’s no place to put the additional street lanes that would be needed to carry all of the traffic at the same level of service,” he says, adding that there are “very few north-south streets in that area, and not nearly so many connections to the Harbor Freeway (as compared to access from the east side).”

An apparition of what all this could mean visited L.A.’s central business district on the evening of Nov. 1, 1983. More than half an inch of rain fell between 4 and 5 p.m., leading to what Howery has called one of the “worst traffic jams anyone here can remember.” For several hours, traffic came to a standstill. Buses ran up to two hours late, leaving hundreds stranded in the rain. Stalled cars blocked many downtown streets. Some commuters, faced with 30-minute travel times from block to block, simply abandoned their cars, often to take refuge in the already crowded local bars. At the Second Street Saloon, a mother and her 12 children trooped in the door from a van stuck in traffic outside. While the driver waited for them, they all used the restaurant’s bathroom--and when they returned to the vehicle, it hadn’t moved a foot.

In hopes of preventing nightmares like this from becoming a daily reality, planners have come up with a number of schemes to alleviate congestion. The most high-gloss of these, of course, is Metro Rail. Yet, even if this multibillion-dollar, on-again, off-again subway project is built, it will be at least 1992 before the first four-mile segment through downtown is completed, and we’ll have entered the next century before the first Metro Rail car enters the San Fernando Valley.

In the meantime, L.A.’s transportation department has put together a package of proposals to deal with the traffic problems downtown, ranging from installation of the ATSAC system to widening streets and prohibiting certain turns. Some of the proposed remedies, such as stepped-up parking enforcement, are already in effect; others, including widening the 3rd Street tunnel, will soon begin. And the department is working with the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency to develop a peripheral parking plan, which would create parking lots at the edge of the downtown area from which commuters could enter the business district in shuttle buses.

Some of the department’s suggestions have come under attack, however, such as the proposal to turn six of downtown’s primary north-south thoroughfares into three one-way couplets. During the Olympics there was a significant improvement in traffic flow when Figueroa and Flower were temporarily turned into one-way streets, and the new plan would add Olive-Grand and Broadway-Hill as one-way pairs. But some downtown business owners have taken exception to the idea. The Broadway Merchants Assn., for example, has expressed its fear that the plan will restrict customer access to the thriving Broadway shopping strip.

Although each of these proposals is working its way through the L.A. City Council on an independent track, Howery maintains that the entire package is necessary to make a serious dent in downtown traffic problems. “No one measure will accomplish all that you need to accomplish,” he says, but, if the proposals are taken all together, “it would work quite well.”

It’s just after noon, and California Department of Transportation engineer Terry Wong is sitting in his office at Caltrans’ downtown L.A. district headquarters. He has taken only a few bites from his sandwich when a call comes in from the California Highway Patrol.

Ten minutes before, a driver trying to negotiate the interchange of the Golden State and Pasadena freeways had bounced off the wall and hit another car, which in turn rammed a garbage truck and sent it through the nearest guardrail. When the dust settled, the garbage truck was lying on its side, hanging over the guardrail with one door flapping open, and blocking the transition ramp to the northbound Pasadena.

Within minutes, the Golden State is jammed up all the way back to the Glendale Freeway, and Wong and several other members of Caltrans’ Major Incident Traffic Management Team are on their way to the scene. While the CHP tends to the injured and helps direct traffic, some members of the team set up flashing signs to warn oncoming motorists that they will have to detour. Others get busy repairing the guardrail. Within half an hour a private tow crew called by the CHP has the garbage truck upright, but it will be at least two hours before the mess is cleaned up and access to the Pasadena Freeway restored.

The team responds to about four or five such incidents each week, whenever it looks as though traffic will be tied up for two or more hours. Usually, the goal is to get the accident cleared as soon as possible, but Wong explains that sometimes clearing an accident makes traffic even worse, since Caltrans may have to block additional lanes. “If we feel that we can’t accomplish much with all the traffic, sometimes we’ll decide it’s better to wait for the peak to pass.”

For many L.A. drivers, being forced to hit the brakes while cruising down a six-lane freeway is akin to a personal insult, an affront to their sense of independence and mobility. Area residents look back nostalgically to those 16 days in the summer of 1984--during the Olympic Games--when traffic flowed so smoothly that they could zip from one freeway to the next with rarely a touch of foot to brake.

For much-maligned Caltrans officials--who, it seems, will never live down their failed attempt to reserve a special “diamond lane” on the Santa Monica Freeway for car pools and buses--those were glory days. Their daily press conferences on the traffic situation were covered as closely as any Olympic event. The Olympics proved, says Caltrans Deputy District Director David Roper, that “relatively minor changes in our traffic patterns . . . can produce significant results as far as the traffic jams, the congestion.”

Roper believes that the most important factors included alterations in commuter and truck-delivery schedules. “There were a lot of adjustments taking place there that people were willing to do for 16 days,” he says. “The big question is, would they be willing to do them for 365 days a year?” Roper cautions that “we should keep our expectations realistic. . . . I don’t think the L.A. Basin will ever get, on a 365-day basis, like the Olympics. . . . This sounds very negative, but if traffic is too good, the average person, not understanding his impact on how that traffic operates, is going to make changes that will destroy the good flow of traffic.”

Nevertheless, in an effort to try to recapture at least some of that Olympic magic, Caltrans and other agencies have been talking with some firms about changing traffic patterns on a permanent basis. “Whenever we’ve talked about shifting work hours,” Roper says, “people have said, ‘We’re not going to come to work at 4 in the morning.’ We’re not talking about 4 in the morning, we’re suggesting maybe 7:30 instead of 8.”

Traffic planners agree that unless changes in commuting habits are made, the L.A. metropolitan area will become one giant, idling-room-only parking lot. The days when engineers could sponge up excess traffic by laying down one freeway after another are gone--the resources no longer available. The Southern California Assn. of Governments, whose responsibilities include regional transportation planning, estimates that, by the year 2000, funding for the freeway and rapid-transit projects now in the planning stages will fall short of what’s needed by $13 billion.

According to Martin Wachs, such shortages are due in part to increased competition for funds between older urban areas and newer suburban developments. “Just at the time when we have to face high maintenance and improvement costs on the older elements of the system, we’re also getting pressure to build new freeways and invest in new transit in the outlying areas,” he says. “We don’t have the money to do both.”

Faced with this economic reality--and predictions that even projects for which funds have already been committed, such as the Century Freeway, will be operating at or beyond their capacity as soon as they are built--planners are looking for ways to get more movement out of the existing system. There are only two ways to do this: Decrease the demand on the system, by encouraging car pools, van pools and greater use of transit services; and increase the capacity of the system, by opening freeway shoulders to traffic during peak hours, building new busways and improving the efficiency of surface streets through widening and other measures.

Planners say that an increase in ride sharing is essential to easing traffic congestion, and SCAG has called for car-pool and van-pool use to expand by 64% in coming years. But that may seem ambitious in light of a key element of L.A.’s cultural mythology, which envisions thousands of lone commuters rolling down the freeways, experiencing what author Joan Didion has called “the only secular communion Los Angeles has.”

Indeed, one glance at a typical commuter cruising down the freeway in his or her private metal-and-glass cocoon, completely absorbed in thought or bouncing up and down to the beat on the radio, makes it hard to believe that L.A. drivers will ever be pried out of their cars. Yet, over the past decade, thousands of commuters have given up their solitary life behind the wheel in favor of car-pooling or public transportation. In fact, about 45% of the nearly 250,000 who work in downtown Los Angeles arrive by bus--a proportion higher than in any other U.S. city.

“As parking prices increase, as congestion increases, as we see ‘affordable’ homes being developed farther and farther from the concentrations of jobs . . . the market for ride sharing is growing,” says Tad Widby, president of Commuter Computer, a publicly funded organization that helps individuals and corporations set up car pools and van pools.

Ride-share advocates recently suffered a serious setback, however, when the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District voted, 8 to 5, to scrap the proposed “Regulation 6,” which would have required large firms to appoint ride-sharing coordinators and provide incentives for their employees to car-pool or take the bus. The regulation would have applied to public and private employers who have more than 700 workers at any one location, and the SCAQMD staff had estimated that the regulation could have taken up to 200,000 cars off the freeways each day--almost as many as now drive the Ventura Freeway.

Regulation 6 had the support of SCAG and the city councils of Los Angeles and many smaller cities and was endorsed by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Yet it was defeated after a strident campaign led by SCAQMD vice chairman Thomas Heinsheimer, who branded the proposal a “first step” toward mandatory ride sharing. “Many of the board members are very conservative,” says Sabrina Schiller, project coordinator of the Coalition for Clean Air and an SCAQMD board member. “They feel it is not the place of government to intervene into these areas.”

The regulation’s defeat is just one example of the counterattacks that planners undergo when they launch their assaults on congestion. Frequently, mitigation measures cause some negative impact on surrounding communities, and those who feel that their turf is being encroached upon descend on the transportation agencies involved. A current example is the controversy over proposals to alleviate congestion on Santa Monica Boulevard between Fairfax Avenue and the San Diego Freeway, a corridor that runs through West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

Because Santa Monica Boulevard is a section of California 2, Caltrans is in charge of the project. One of the solutions under consideration is to widen sections of the street using the existing railroad right of way--which in West Hollywood would mean paving the median strip, a suggestion that has outraged the new city’s elected officials. The median strip has become an integral part of West Hollywood’s beautification plans, and Mayor John Heilman says that any plan to widen the street in his city is “unacceptable.” Although Caltrans design engineer Dave Kilmurray says that the agency is not yet ready to make a recommendation, many residents suspect that a road-widening project is a fait accompli . At a public hearing held last November in the auditorium of a West Los Angeles junior high school, a panel of dour-faced Caltrans officials listened for two hours as one speaker after another rose from the audience to argue against the idea.

“This is probably the last chance we have to look at long-term, durable solutions,” Irwin Kaplan, Beverly Hills’ planning and community development director, told the panel, “rather than widening, which will land us back here again in a few years.” Beverly Hills officials have proposed that a tunnel be built under the city’s 1.6-mile portion of Santa Monica Boulevard, a suggestion that few others are taking seriously. But Kaplan, citing a study that concluded that 40% of the cars using the street are merely passing through his city, maintains that a tunnel would benefit everyone who uses the thoroughfare. The tunnel, he says, “would make their lives a lot better.”

As for its estimated $127-million price tag, Kaplan says that funding the project “must be some kind of a team effort” and suggests that Caltrans’ reluctance to take the idea seriously shows a lack of imagination. “I think that their vision is skewed by the funding politics. They have become very practical over the years,” he says. “The tunnel is there, all we have to do is take the earth out of it.”

Many critics believe that traffic congestion problems cannot be resolved unless development is slowed down--at best, an unlikely prospect. And so traffic planners have resigned themselves to playing a game of catch-up. “Given that (pro-development) decisions are made,” says David Roper, “the responsibility of transportation agencies is to try to develop the best transportation system possible to support that type of land use.” And RTD General Manager John Dyer says that the development boom, especially in downtown Los Angeles, “is the kind that every city in the United States and the Free World would love to get. It offers an opportunity for sustained economic growth.”

Contrasted with older East Coast cities, Los Angeles is a relative newcomer to the ranks of major metropolitan centers. Many residents moved here precisely because Los Angeles was not really a city at all, but a loose network of sunny urban villages with palm-lined streets and lots of elbow room. Today, the villages have grown together, and by the year 2000 Los Angeles is projected to become the most populous urban area in the country, a prospect that carries with it many new opportunities. As Los Angeles motors its way into the 21st Century, the challenge for its leaders will be to keep the city from choking on the exhaust of its own vision.