Mean and Snarled : The Streets: Strangling L.A. Growth

Somebody had better do something fast

--Headline about Los Angeles traffic in a magazine for urban planners

Tom Bradley has a dream for Los Angeles, a dream that includes a showcase subway, grand hotels and office towers spilling west from downtown and a reputation as a “world city” with ties to Tokyo and Osaka as close as to Baltimore and Boston.

“This city has already reached the position where it is the gateway to the Pacific Rim,” Bradley, mayor since 1973, boasted recently.

His dream, shared by the chairmen of downtown corporations and many planners, is the main reason the city encourages developers to build more high-rise buildings. But the dream is threatened by the same force that prompted the civic boosters of the 1940s to build freeways--choking traffic on the streets and in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and many other Southern California cities.

Gates Discovered Problem

One day last October, in the middle of the afternoon rush, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates found out just how clogged the mean streets of Los Angeles have become.

He was riding to the scene of a robbery on Temple Street in Echo Park but was not getting there very fast. The suspect was thought to be holed up in a pharmacy, and police had closed off Temple. Commuters trying to leave downtown were peeling off into nearby neighborhoods too fast for the tiny, winding streets to absorb. The Hollywood Freeway, which cuts through the area, was snarled as helicopters circled and gawkers gawked.

Traffic was a mess for miles around.

“I just could not believe the traffic situation--really unbelievable,” Gates said recently. “By the time I got there I was really incensed.”

Becoming More Common

Those afternoons are becoming more common as the city’s streets turn more crowded--and not just downtown. Cars pouring out of Century City and Westwood at 5 o’clock mingle into one giant traffic jam on the Westside. Sherman Way and other main streets across the San Fernando Valley are clogged for two hours many afternoons. It can take a native’s knowledge of the back ways to make flights on time now that Los Angeles International Airport is bounded by busy hotels and office buildings, many of them put up to service Southern California’s burgeoning Pacific business.

Even Bel-Air, where the limousines of the city’s richest cruise quiet, hilly streets, is not free of the traffic plague. Every afternoon, drivers trying to escape the busy San Diego Freeway race through the Bel-Air gate on Sunset Boulevard and up the canyons to the San Fernando Valley. “I used to have it to myself, but now it’s crowded,” said Jeff Styler, who commutes by motorcycle over Roscomare Road.

In an absolute sense, the traffic on Los Angeles streets is not so bad. The kind of daily gridlock that New York and Boston suffer is unheard of here, thanks to the massive system of streets and wide boulevards. A visitor from Hong Kong or London, when told how upset Angelenos are about traffic, might just smile and wonder what all the fuss is about.

“I’ve seen congestion in almost every major city of the world far worse,” Bradley said in an interview. “By comparison, L.A.’s a paradise.”

Character of Driving Changed

But for many residents, especially those who have lived in Los Angeles a good while, the character of driving in the city has changed. Once, the only snarls anyone talked about were on the freeways. Now homeowner groups plead regularly with the city to close off local streets because of rush-hour interlopers, and permits are needed to park in more than 30 neighborhoods.

The future looks bleaker because Los Angeles streets are essentially mature--not many can be widened. As traffic increases, “quiet neighborhoods will be swamped by motorists looking for faster routes. Rush hour will truly come to each of our doorsteps,” the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission said recently.

Statistics also confirm what many people believe: The increasing traffic pressure of daily life has turned the streets of Los Angeles a little meaner. The social contract that persuades most people to stop at red lights and give way to pedestrians is losing its grip, turning the streets into a free-for-all with deadly results.

Last year, 131 pedestrians were killed on Los Angeles streets, a big jump from the previous year but a little below the record of 136 in 1984. Twenty-six motorists were killed in Los Angeles in the bloody aftermath of those split-second decisions to speed through a red light rather than stop.

Twenty-seven people were killed because of drivers who tried squeeze in a left turn when traffic was coming. Nearly 300 people were seriously injured in the maiming, high-speed accidents that red-light runners and other daredevils cause.

300,000 Red-Light Citations

Police in New York and Washington have cut into red-light violations by clamping down with special sweeps and higher fines. There has been no such crackdown in Los Angeles but, even so, Los Angeles police since 1981 have written more than 300,000 citations for running red lights, more than for speeding or any other violation. Everyone, it seems, has a story about a near-miss now that the yellow light is taken by many drivers as a signal to step on the accelerator.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Times reporters kept tabs for an hour at nine intersections in Los Angeles County. The informal tally spotted 272 drivers who ignored the red light and 428 who turned left on the red, including 15 at a corner (Venice Boulevard and Vermont Avenue) where signs are posted banning all left turns at rush hour.

“The last 2-3 years there has been a real increase in undisciplined drivers on our streets,” said Gates, who nonetheless said there is no money for more motorcycle officers. “I think the feeling of most motorists is that it’s dangerous out there.”

Gates attributes the lack of discipline in part to the legions of drivers, many of them recent immigrants, who did not grow up in the tradition of courteous Southern California driving. “It used to be that our pedestrians, and our drivers, were the most disciplined in the world,” Gates said. “We no longer are.”

But transportation experts say this growing lawlessness is a sign of desperation, seen elsewhere when congestion has increased. “I’m not sure there is any quantifiable evidence, but there is a consensus among transportation engineers that it is true,” said Martin Wachs, UCLA professor of urban planning.

New Level of Carnage

If desperation is pushing Los Angeles drivers to bend the rules, the next few years could bring a new level of carnage.

Massive disruption is expected the next few years by major construction projects: the digging for the Metro Rail subway downtown, laying of a surface rail track from downtown to Long Beach, massive court-ordered repairs to the city’s sewers and a stepped-up schedule of street repairs and storm-drain installations. A crude-oil pipeline from Kern County to the harbor may also be buried along more than 30 miles of city streets.

The worst will be downtown, where Metro Rail construction has already begun to badly snarl traffic on 1st and 7th streets. In the next year, major work will disrupt Spring Street and Alameda Avenue as well.

All the while, legions of new employees and their cars are being added downtown, the area of the city Bradley and others want to develop into the center of Southern California’s foreign commerce.

Every day, 1.4 million people pass through the 1.1-mile-square center of downtown, riding in 722,000 cars, trucks and buses. Amazingly, that is about the same number of people as in 1924, when the city first counted the traffic flow. The daily tally declined after 1940, as downtown aged into decay, and it was not until 1984, after 20 years of urban renewal, that the count of daily visitors again surpassed that of the 1920s.

But it was different back then. In the ‘20s, most people came downtown on the Red Cars and Los Angeles Railways street cars. There was even a short subway line briefly. Now, more than 60% drive in by car, using the wide boulevards that point into downtown--Olympic, Beverly, Venice, Whittier--as de facto expressways now that the freeways are so congested.

Buses Clog Traffic

Traffic in downtown Los Angeles is worst between 3:30 and 6 p.m., when 89,000 cars and trucks pour out of parking lots and garages and try to squirt out of the central business district. They share the streets with more than 1,500 buses, many only routed through downtown on their way to somewhere else. The buses are a major traffic clog downtown, blocking intersections and forcing commuters to abandon the right lanes of many streets.

Bus snarls worsened in the nearly two years that a special bus lane on Spring Street was closed. Pavement on the bus lane needs repair, but a dispute between the city and the Southern California Rapid Transit District has delayed work. Meanwhile, displaced buses cluttered narrow Broadway while the bus lane was used mainly by wrong-way drivers and police, who parked in it while banking and lunching. Under pressure, the city eventually decided to make temporary patches in the pavement so the lane could reopen this month.

If downtown commuters think traffic is more intense lately, that’s because it is. The street system has not significantly changed, but it is carrying at least 13,000 more cars at rush hour since 1980.

Within the next five years, the completion of new office buildings is expected to lure 80,000 more workers--and at least 13,000 additional cars--into downtown at the afternoon rush, city traffic chief Donald Howery said. Those workers are going to try to fit, with up to 1,000 more buses, on a street system that cannot be easily expanded.

“It sounds like bull, but it’s true--this really is the heart of the Pacific Rim, and people from Japan, from all over, want to build in Southern California,” said Daniel Garcia, the chairman under Bradley of the city Planning Commission.

“Clearly, traffic is not going to get better. It’s only a matter of how much worse it’s going to get.”

The “world city” idea is presented most clearly by the Central City Assn., a group that represents the major corporate landowners downtown and whose president, Christopher Stewart, is a key Bradley appointee to the five-member Community Redevelopment Agency board that makes most downtown growth decisions.

Financial Capital

They see downtown becoming the financial capital of the Pacific region, with a huge new world trade complex of hotels, tall office towers and a foreign commodities exchange being built in the area of Union Station and the Terminal Annex post office. It would spread for two miles into Chinatown and Little Tokyo, according to a vision of the future published last year.

Their vision concludes that a new underground freeway along Alvarado Street, plus Metro Rail and a series of viaducts connecting downtown to distant parking lots, will not only alleviate the masses of traffic the new growth will lure but also reduce congestion below today’s levels.

In a slightly different view, Bradley dismisses the grand “Alvarado Parkway” as something that will never be built. But he says Metro Rail and connecting surface rail lines will create enough new transportation downtown to let more high-rise office towers be built, which in turn means jobs. “If you don’t have Metro Rail, you are going to have problems so bad the city simply could not grow,” Bradley said in an interview.

But traffic officials see a much gloomier future.

Five years ago, Howery calculated that downtown street capacity would have to expand by the equivalent of eight new freeway lanes just to freeze congestion where it was then. He criticized city planners for a lack of concern for traffic and parking and said that by 1990, it might be necessary to ban all daytime truck deliveries downtown.

By 1984, a study for Howery’s Department of Transportation revised all the numbers upward. “Gridlock conditions could easily occur on a regular basis” by the early 1990s, the report cautioned.

Bad traffic is not new to downtown. Old photos show the traffic of the 1920s worse than it is today, even with the extensive streetcar and rail system. It got so bad that in 1920 the City Council banned street parking downtown. But within days, outraged merchants forced a change to allow parking at the curb before 4 p.m., when the afternoon rush hour began.

When urban renewal started rebuilding downtown in the 1960s, the plan was to ease the traffic everyone foresaw in the 1980s and ‘90s with a futuristic people-mover transit system. But a few years ago, taxpayers outside of downtown killed funding for the people mover.

One-Way Streets

In the last year, the city has taken cheaper steps to make downtown traffic flow smoother. Key streets, including Figueroa and Hill, were switched to one-way traffic, which moves more cars than regular two-way operation.

The switch was announced as a temporary step to fight the backups from Metro Rail construction and was diluted before it even began when Broadway merchants persuaded the City Council to exempt their street. But Howery said he hopes to make the one-way policy permanent, and plans are in place to include Grand Avenue and Olive Street. As traffic increases, officials may also want to convert streets in the Valley and Hollywood to one-way. More reversible lanes, like the one on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, may also be used.

The city is also wiring 162 downtown intersections to a computer in the depths of City Hall East. When completed in about a year, the computer will sense the traffic flow and electronically balance stoplights to make the best use of the streets.

When needed, a traffic engineer in a high-tech control room several stories below City Hall East will be able to manipulate the length of red and green lights to clear up bottlenecks. This approach was in place on main streets around the Memorial Coliseum during the 1984 Olympics. It was so successful that traffic officials plan to expand it to most of the city’s 3,700 signals--which operate now on preset intervals--as money becomes available, beginning with the airport area, Westwood, Ventura Boulevard and Hollywood.

“It is a way to coax about 10% more capacity out of the streets,” a city traffic official said. A similar system is already operating in the four New York City boroughs outside Manhattan.

To squeeze a few more cars onto the streets, the city has also banned rush-hour parking on main streets and gotten tougher on cars parked illegally. A special target is cars parked in the right lane on main thoroughfares during rush hour. Last year, the city towed away 15,591 rush-hour violators downtown, on the Westside and in the Valley, a sharp increase from past years. This opened up an extra lane to high-speed traffic on several streets.

Denver Boot Being Used

Parking tickets written in the city nearly doubled from 1.7 million to 2.9 million last year, and the “Denver Boot” is being used more often to catch scofflaws, city parking administrator Robert Yates said. About 3,600 cars were booted last year, and this year the city increased its supply of boots tenfold and sent warning notices to 35,000 chronic violators who might have their cars immobilized by the device if they do not pay their tickets.

More traffic officers have also been added at intersections to wave traffic along at rush hour, although only eight intersections--all downtown--are regularly staffed. But 43 corners may need help at the height of Metro Rail construction, officials said.

At the request of the city, Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) has introduced a bill to make it illegal for drivers to enter an intersection if there is no clear way out when the light turns red. The worst downtown gridlock in memory, during an afternoon rainstorm Nov. 1, 1983, locked up streets so badly that it took 30 minutes to go a single block; it could have been avoided if drivers had kept the intersections clear. But current law requires drivers to go on the green light, regardless of what lies ahead.

Bradley has also created a special committee to study downtown traffic. The group considered, then rejected, requiring downtown employers to move their parking lots outside of downtown.

But traffic all over the city is going to get worse as the city grows, Bradley and others caution.

“We can no longer enjoy the luxury of a congestion-free environment,” said Kenneth Orski, a Washington transportation consultant familiar with Los Angeles. “We will learn to live better with congestion than we have in the past.”

Gates Critical of Policies

Recently, Chief Gates joined the ranks of critics who say that the mayor’s and the City Council’s growth policies need to be reined in to get a handle on traffic.

“There’s no point in building another building when you can’t get people into it,” Gates said in an interview. “We really have not taken this thing seriously. It is a terrible drain on us in every way.”

Many cities require that the traffic impact of all large developments be considered before construction can begin. In some cases, officials order changes in the size of a new building or the placement of driveways to help reduce traffic snarls. San Francisco, New York and even many small cities in Los Angeles County follow this practice to get a handle on congestion, planning experts say.

But Los Angeles, which has actively encouraged developers to build here, has never flatly imposed such a requirement on most new construction projects outside downtown.

Instead, the city exempts many large developers from preparing an environmental impact report and other public disclosures so long as their building conforms with city zoning. Los Angeles officials say they don’t have the power to review such projects and must simply issue building permits without exercising any discretion.

Challenging that view, Westwood property owners have sued over the city’s routine approval of a 26-story office tower planned for the most congested stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. Last month, a state appeals court sided with the property owners and set the stage for a trial.

The trouble, many critics say, is that the city’s basic zoning law, approved in 1946, allows for many more residents and commercial buildings than the streets can possibly support, despite periodic revisions.

For instance, owners of the large parcel of land in the Fairfax district that houses the CBS television studio and Farmer’s Market could legally build more than 3 million additional square feet for offices and other commercial uses, adding thousands of cars to the already-crowded local streets, without detailed scrutiny by city officials. The company once talked of such a big development but currently has no plans for one.

‘Probably Most Lenient’

“Los Angeles is probably the most lenient city when it comes to reviewing large projects,” said City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who with Councilman Marvin Braude proposed last year that the city use its powers under state law to scrutinize all large new projects for their traffic impact. The suggestion is pending but lacks strong council support and is opposed by Bradley.

The two largest shopping centers built in recent years on the Westside were built without a thorough city evaluation of traffic, planning officials said. Beverly Center, on La Cienega Boulevard, complied with zoning even though the city’s planning director at the time, Calvin Hamilton, said “the traffic problems that could be caused by this center are monumental. No amount of studies or calculations can dispute the fact that the developers have squeezed a massive shopping complex into an area already overburdened with automobiles.”

The Westside Pavilion mall is popular with shoppers, but nearby residents complain that it has aggravated traffic tie-ups on Westwood Boulevard and neighborhood streets. They have persuaded the city to block off one street to shoppers and ban parking without a permit on the others.

“If we had (the reviews) in place the Westside Pavilion would never have been built,” Yaroslavsky said.

However, critics include Yaroslavsky when they say the city’s current traffic woes can be traced to the City Council’s close political ties to developers. Even when the council does step in, members apply only minor restrictions that allow development in areas with bad traffic, homeowner group leaders contend.

For instance, three high-rise office towers the council approved are under construction on Wilshire Boulevard in the heart of Westwood, within sight of the Wilshire-Veteran Avenue intersection, the city’s second-busiest. Not far away, two new high-rise office towers are planned for the city’s fourth-busiest corner, at Santa Monica and Sepulveda boulevards.

‘When Is Enough Enough?’

“What the city has never come to grips with is, when is enough enough?” said Laura Lake, a UCLA professor and leader of Not Yet New York, one of the city’s most vocal slow-growth groups.

Bradley and his administration argue that requiring the City Council to study every development would increase the influence of real estate interests, not lead to more deliberate weighing of the pros and cons.

The 1946 zoning, which would have permitted a population of 10 million, has been rolled back so that the city’s eventual size will never top 4 million. Future growth has been sharply reduced in Century City, for instance, where the failure to build the once-envisioned Beverly Hills Freeway has left surrounding main streets such as Santa Monica Boulevard and Motor Avenue a mess.

But the city has cut back on future growth only under legal fire. A series of official “community plans” adopted by citizen committees have urged the city to revise the outdated zoning to scale down growth for more than a decade. Then a 1978 state law ordered the city to comply with the community plans.

But the City Council resisted, saying the task was too taxing for the planning staff. It was not until a lawsuit was filed--noting that most other cities in California had complied with the law years earlier--that Los Angeles began to comply. By then, critics say, many more projects had been built and many more political contributions from real estate interests had been received.

Voters signaled their intolerance last November by passing Proposition U, a Braude-Yaroslavsky measure that cuts in half the allowable size of future high-rise buildings on 70% of the city’s commercial land. It does not apply to downtown, Hollywood and many other high-growth areas, but it has stripped power over high-rise growth in some areas away from the City Council.

Impact on Future Traffic

“It will have a big impact on future traffic,” UCLA professor of urban planning Martin Wachs said. “I think Proposition U is a dramatic event in the history of Los Angeles.”

Since the November election, the traffic problem has attracted more attention than ever from local politicians.

Gates issued a call to make a massive shift in the hours that government employees spend at work. He said city offices should remain open until 7 p.m. to better serve the public and to keep some commuters off the streets at rush hour. His suggestions have received no official response from Bradley or the council.

Braude won approval of a law requiring employers and owners of many buildings to encourage ride-sharing by employees and tenants. The South Coast Air Quality Management District board considered a similar regulation as an air pollution tactic, but the idea was voted down.

Councilman Mike Woo called for several studies for new traffic measures and together with Mayor Bradley called for traffic “swat teams” to recommend ways to ease congestion in Hollywood, on Ventura Boulevard and in Westwood.

Elsewhere, the county Board of Supervisors wants to look into computerizing traffic lights on the streets it operates and to encourage more car-pooling by government workers.

Perhaps the most sweeping move was the adoption in Los Angeles of the Traffic Reduction and Improvement Plan ordinance pushed by Council President Pat Russell. Approved unanimously in February after almost two years of discussion, it makes it easier for the City Council to impose fees on developers for street improvements and force them to encourage car-pooling and other sharing of commutes by employees.

Ground-Breaking Ordinance

Russell called it a ground-breaking ordinance because it requires developers to pay for the added traffic their projects create. It is copied after an ordinance in the Westchester and Venice area that charged developers $2,010 for each rush-hour car trip to their building and required them to reduce the expected number of trips by about 15%.

But critics of the Westchester-Venice ordinance point out that the law is intended more to raise money for street improvements than to actually slow the pace of growth. The new citywide plan also allows the council considerable leeway to decide what areas of the city will be covered. “This ordinance says stop, look and listen,” said Braude, a supporter. “But that doesn’t say it goes far enough or that we are doing anything specific here. We’re moving slowly and the problem is galloping on faster and faster.”

And in last Tuesday’s election, Russell was forced into a June runoff despite spending $260,000 on a campaign in which she had to defend herself against charges that she favors too much development.

Attacking street traffic outside of the city of Los Angeles is made more difficult by the plethora of small cities that make up the county. “There are 88 cities and each one is a little fiefdom,” said Dan Garcia of the city Planning Commission.

Beverly Hills found out how difficult it is to control traffic. In 1984, voters barred the construction of three new hotels in the city’s lustrous shopping district. But the Four Seasons hotel got a permit from the City of Los Angeles and opens this month just outside the Beverly Hills boundary--out of the city’s control but close enough that much, if not most, of the hotel’s traffic will pass through Beverly Hills.

RUNNING RED LIGHTS The stop light turns yellow. An RTD bus heading north on Broadway surges forward, passing the crosswalk just before the light changes to red-- barely legal.

Drivers waiting on 2nd Street see their light flip to green. They step off the brake and make ready to go. The RTD bus passes by in front and leaves the intersection, bound for Chinatown.

Four were hurt when a driver ran through a red light in downtown Los Angeles.

Seeing daylight ahead, the drivers on 2nd Street move their feet to the gas pedal. Just then, the bus is followed through the intersection by a pickup truck, racing through a full second after the red light.

A high-speed crash is avoided only because the drivers at the green light were slow to hit the gas.

It is more than just a matter of discourtesy: Twenty-six people were killed last year in Los Angeles in accidents caused by red-light runners, and hundreds more were injured.

Just how many drivers are running red lights in the area these days?

The Times monitored nine intersections for an hour one recent afternoon, looking for drivers who ignore traffic laws. It was the middle of rush hour, and traffic at most locations was heavy. In all, Times reporters spotted 272 cars, trucks and buses that drove through the intersections after the light turned red. An additional 428 drivers who were caught behind the line when the light turned nonetheless squeezed in a left turn.

The worst corner was at Sepulveda and Manchester boulevards, a busy intersection near Los Angeles International Airport. In the 60 minutes, 240 drivers were observed violating the red light law, most by turning left.

At Venice Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, in the crowded midtown area, 15 drivers were observed turning left on the red even though a sign is posted banning all left turns at that hour.

No. Who Red Light Drove Corner Violations Straight 1. Sepulveda and Manchester boulevards 240 18 2. Canoga and Burbank boulevards 172 59 3. Venice Boulevard and Vermont Avenue 97 60 4. Sherman Way and Sepulveda Boulevard 64 34 5. Lakewood and Del Amo boulevards 35 12 6. Wilshire and Westwood boulevards 32 32 7. Crescent Heights and Olympic boulevards 30 30 8. 2nd Street and Broadway 15 12 9. Whittier and Rosemead boulevards 15 15

No. Who Turned Left 1. 222 2. 113 3. 37* 4. 30 5. 23 6. -- 7. -- 8. 3 9. 6

* Includes 15 where any left was illegal .

Left turns on red arrows.