The Lights Are All Red

It now takes 90 minutes to drive from Los Angeles to San Diego. By the turn of the century--not so far down the road--it will take three hours. The afternoon rush coagulates nearly all of the 722-mile web of freeways in Southern California. If the California Department of Transportation had $7 billion to make every freeway improvement that it can imagine over the next 20 years, drivers would be swimming in the same hydrocarbon soup, moving no faster and perhaps slower than they do today. Besides, Caltrans doesn’t have $7 billion.

In a series of articles this week, Times writer Kevin Roderick forced us to see the future in both grand design and minute detail, and the future is not a pretty sight. It looks, in fact, a lot like the present, with surface streets getting meaner by the day and more dangerous as more drivers treat yellow lights as signals to step on the gas.

In a society so enmeshed in high technology, the impulse is to invent a way out of a mess like that. Put a monorail here, double-deck that freeway, bury a wire in the road that will guide cars with a signal and allow them to glide along as tightly packed as the cars of a train. One blowout would cripple that idea, and most other grand schemes are just as vulnerable.

Roderick touched every base and checked every idea, and concluded that there is no quick fix. The problem is not hopeless, but the best that can be hoped for is congestion a touch above tolerable--and even that will take hard work, a lot of money and some changes in the way Southern Californians live and work.

Keeping traffic barely tolerable will mean more computerized traffic signals, more stringent monitoring of freeway ramps, all of the $7 billion worth of projects that Caltrans cannot afford, staggered working hours, fewer trucks during rush hour, a duplicate of the Olympic Games clean sweep in the roads event, and then some.

Where to start? According to one traffic specialist, spreading what is now a standard 9 a.m. starting time for 15 minutes on each side of the magic hour would help. Staggered hours cannot be imposed on business, but business can be persuaded that staggering hours would be a major contribution as part of an overall blueprint.

A chronological checklist showing, step by step, who must do what and when is the place to start. It won’t be easy. Traffic, after all, is the culmination of individual decisions by millions of people at steering wheels, each following ground rules that can be broken by something as simple as a ladder falling off a truck. But it shouldn’t be impossible, either, and the planners should put it together before the next ladder falls.