The Incredible Shrinking Freeway Traffic Lane

Maybe you’ve noticed the squeeze play occurring with increasing frequency on freeways lately, the engineering maneuver in which more lanes somehow materialize out of the same amount of old pavement.

Or perhaps your ears have recently awakened to that heartening sound resembling a transmission falling out of the car--only to realize you’re merely speeding over yet another ex-shoulder being born again as the freeway’s newest fast lane.

You may have further observed that the creation of new corridors and their dizzying restriping seemingly has been contagious to dozens of local surface streets, where there are no shoulders to be sacrificed but where new lanes regularly appear anyway.

Have transportation engineers finally declared that smaller cars now rule the roadways, and that fewer shoulders and shrinking lanes are the answer to Southern California traffic problems? (Caltrans’ officials estimate that Los Angeles-area motorists endure about 200,000 vehicle-hours of delay per day, and that’s only on the freeways.)

But if lanes are, in fact, getting tinier, what are buses and big cars and vans and 18-wheeler semitrucks supposed to do?

And when was it decreed that vehicles no longer need so many shoulders to land on? While we’re asking, is it possible we’re being slowly conditioned to one day accept compact-car-only lanes too?

Chuck O’Connell of Caltrans and Alice Lepis and T. K. Prime of the L.A. City Department of Transportation are people with the answers, which they emphasize are only part of the solution to Southern California’s growing traffic congestion.

According to these officials, freeway lanes and Los Angeles city streets are indeed shrinking in many places to make room for both more lanes and turn pockets. But the lanes are not being narrowed dramatically--usually just a cautious foot or two--in spots where it can be shown that safety hazards will not be created.

In addition, the experts indicated, lane diminishment is not accomplished by a simple decree based on the trend to smaller cars. Rather, it’s a matter of complex and delicate negotiation, usually with the federal government, which still maintains specific standards for lane widths anywhere its funds have helped create a roadway.

So much for the theory that smaller cars are being recognized as King of the Road. At the newer shopping malls maybe. But not on federally funded streets and freeways.

For while many cars are indeed getting smaller, Lepis pointed out, quite a significant number of vehicles are getting larger and longer. She observed that motorists have been purchasing more vans and trucks in recent years. And that some buses, trucks and limousines are longer than ever before.

That may be one reason Lepis has heard of no proposals for compact-car-only lanes within the city. That’s also why Los Angeles cannot narrow lanes that buses generally use, said the city’s principal transportation engineer. (Buses are generally about 8 to 8 1/2 feet wide.)

Narrowest of All

She added, however, that inner lanes are sometimes being narrowed and that left turn lanes are occasionally becoming the narrowest of all because traffic moves more slowly in turn lanes.

But just squeezing an extra foot or so from existing lanes is generally not enough to create an entirely new aisle for automobiles. A standard surface street lane requires 10 feet, said city transportation engineer Prime, if the street is funded by the U.S. government.

Prime noted that the previous federal standard was 11 feet and that lanes constructed to that measure can now be narrowed. But even so, it typically takes considerably more than lane narrowing to create a brand-new corridor.

So how does the city materialize the extra space for new lanes?

It consults its master plan of streets and highways. As Lepis explained, when each Los Angeles city street or highway is constructed it is given a designation: major, secondary, collector or local, each of which requires a different width. “In the land development process, not all streets in the city have been built to their designated standards,” she said. In short, that means a building or yard may partially and temporarily occupy what was originally intended to be roadway or sidewalk.

To reclaim these areas, Lepis added, the city generally waits until the property is being redeveloped. Then the city instructs the developer to return that part of the territory to the city so it can be used to widen the street.

Quest for Street Space

“Say, the standard full width for a major highway is 100 feet,” Lepis said. “That means that there’s a 10-foot sidewalk and 40 feet of roadway for a half street. Say the half street is actually constructed to be only 33 feet of roadway. That means the developer would have to dedicate seven more feet.”

And even if a street is already constructed at the full width for which it was planned, the city can occasionally still get more street space from the developer. As Prime explained, if the developer will be using the property for a different purpose (and possibly getting the area rezoned), the city may then be able to collect additional roadway width from the developer.

The other way Los Angeles creates more lanes per street is to initiate its own street widening projects. But, Prime said, this is increasingly rare for financial, environmental and political reasons: “There’s a diminishing amount of money available every year and a higher percentage of that amount is going to maintenance.”

In addition, city street widening projects have been hampered by what Prime described as “the environmental process”--debates on the destruction of trees, landscaping, displacement of people, and the possibility that widening a street will attract more traffic, pollution and noise. In his view, the environmental process has slowed down and in some cases stopped a lot of street widening projects in areas where no developer owes the city a chunk of the street.

(At present, Los Angeles streets that are being widened as a result of street rededication projects include Alameda Street between Arcadia and Temple Streets, Sunset Boulevard at Allenford Avenue and Olympic Boulevard from Maple Avenue to Los Angeles Street.)

Tremendously Successful

As for freeways, however, many in Southern California are now being widened--if they haven’t been already.

According to Chuck O’Connell, chief of the California Department of Transportation’s Maintenance Field Branch, gaining freeway lanes by converting shoulders (and gaining about a foot from each of the other lanes by narrowing them) has been tremendously successful. So much so that O’Connell thinks it’s possible that all freeways in the urban Los Angeles area will one day offer motorists only one shoulder in each direction.

The first Southern California shoulder disappearance occurred on the Santa Monica Freeway in the early 1970s, said O’Connell, when “it was recognized that development was outstripping our ability to respond.”

As an experiment, the center shoulders were removed from parts of the Santa Monica Freeway and new fast lanes were created. The experiment proved a most popular success, O’Connell added, until the Diamond Lane introduction of 1975 when one fast lane in each direction was restricted to buses/carpools. Motorists overwhelmingly rejected the entire project. “It was technically a success, socially a failure,” he said.

(Since then, O’Connell pointed out, Caltrans has only created Diamond Lanes on new stretches of freeway or immediately on new lanes that result from shoulder elimination projects.)

O’Connell spent 5 1/2 years as chief of Caltrans’ traffic operations systems branch. And he recalled that when the center shoulders were first eliminated on the Santa Monica Freeway 15 years ago, nobody was certain what the safety repercussions would be.

“We didn’t know if we would create a safety problem but we know that as congestion increases, accidents increase. We reasoned that if we could decrease congestion we could increase safety,” he said, adding that roughly 50% of all traffic congestion is the result of the volume of cars traveling during peak hours; the remainder is attributed to accidents, breakdowns, construction and maintenance.

According to O’Connell, studies have shown that removing shoulders from one side of freeways has not resulted in safety problems.

‘Good Drivers in L.A.’

“The result has been that the accident rates have not increased. We do have a good, skillful driver in Los Angeles. The driver has acclimated. Accident rates have not gone up and in many cases they’ve gone down. Traffic has been increasing about 5% a year in the last 10 years and congestion has been increasing as well. If we had not taken the steps we have, we’d probably be experiencing 25% more congestion.”

(O’Connell also recalled that when the Southern California freeway system was drawn up in the mid-1950s, 1,500 miles of freeways were planned for Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. For various financial, political, and environmental reasons, he said, only about 750 of those freeway miles have been built. Thus the emphasis has shifted to creating new lanes as well as adding ramp meters, bus and carpool lanes, electronic message signs and other congestion-reducing devices.)

At present, there are shoulder elimination/lane creation projects in various stages on the Harbor, San Diego, Ventura, Golden State and Santa Ana freeways.

But there is one ironic feature of turning shoulders into lanes. It is that despite the fact that statistics show safety is not adversely affected by replacing shoulders with new traffic lanes, the federal government is still not completely in favor of such moves. According to O’Connell, shoulder removal must still be approved federally and Caltrans must still promise that it will some day replace shoulders.

However, as O’Connell pointed out, the operative words in the policy are some day. “The people in the federal government are sort of like the people from Missouri, they’re ‘show me’ types. When this started, they refused to entirely give up their standards. That policy is presently being reconsidered by the federal government in light of the successes.”

But don’t look for new freeways to come equipped with only one shoulder.

“Where we can do it, we prefer to have two,” O’Connell said. The Century Freeway, for instance, whose completion he predicted will be “1990, plus or minus,” will offer motorists two shoulders in each direction. Plus a bus/carpool lane and a train running down the median.

As of now, the freeway has no plans for a compact-car-only lane.

It may merely be an idea ahead of its time. As O’Connell put it, “It’s been proposed and it’s been talked about a lot. It’s conceivable because we might be in a situation in the near future where nearly all the cars would fit.”