Bradley Calls for Tougher Traffic Regulations

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, declaring that residents will have to make sacrifices to ease growing traffic congestion, proposed on Thursday levying fees on trucks using city streets, increasing traffic violation fines and toughening tow-away policies.

In addition, the mayor asked the City Council to extend the city’s mandatory ride-sharing program, now applicable only to the largest companies, to firms with 200 or more employes.

“We have reached the point that for the overall good, we are going to have to do things differently,” the mayor told a City Hall press conference. “We are going to require sacrifices, but it is for the benefit of all.”

It was the second straight day that the mayor had tackled a quality-of-life issue in a city where recent election results indicate that residents are increasingly unhappy over worsening traffic jams on streets and freeways, and, in some areas, over the proliferation of commercial buildings.

End of LANCER Project

Wednesday, Bradley announced the city was abandoning a controversial trash-burning plant proposal in South-Central Los Angeles. The Los Angeles City Energy Recovery (LANCER) project had attracted widespread opposition in the neighborhood surrounding its site and among environmentalists in other parts of the city.

Sources around the mayor said the flurry of activity came in response to recognition by Bradley and his advisers that his administration needs to start looking more lively after a period of inactivity that followed his losing campaign for governor last Fall.

Those arguing for a more active mayor had their case bolstered when Bradley’s political ally, City Council President Pat Russell, who shared the mayor’s views on many growth and traffic issues, was defeated earlier this month.

And as an added spur, City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who is planning to run against Bradley in 1989, spent the first three days of the week in New York City raising campaign funds from among financial institutions--some of which he said do business with Los Angeles--and from among potential Jewish contributors. Yaroslavsky began in public life as an activist for Jewish causes.

Bradley, intending to run for a fifth term in 1989, first told of his traffic plan in general terms, while addressing a fund-raiser that brought him $50,000 Wednesday night. It was his second $50,000 mayoral fund-raiser.

Details of Plan

The plan, all of which will be submitted to the City Council for approval, would:

- Impose unspecified, but “significant” fees on truck operators for driving on city streets during peak traffic hours. “The amount of the fee . . . will be large enough to encourage truckers to go about their business during non-peak driving periods,” the mayor said in a text distributed at the press conference. Those who don’t pay will be prohibited from using city streets during rush hours.

- Ask the state for permission to impose similar fees on trucks on the freeways during peak hours.

- Use money from the fees to create a “rapid deployment cleanup force” that, using helicopters, would go into action when freeways are blocked by truck crashes.

- Ban curbside deliveries during rush hours.

- Extend to businesses with 200 or more workers the “ride-sharing” ordinance now in effect for companies employing 700 or more. Companies that do not develop plans would face $100-a-day fines. The present ordinance has been criticized as not having tough enough enforcement provisions, but its backers have said it would be more effective by using persuasion rather than high fines.

Companies could comply with the law with plans that have staggered work hours, ride sharing and incentives to persuade employes to use mass transit, including raising the costs of employee parking to “true market value.” Parts of the proposal are designed to discourage companies from subsidizing employee parking. Another feature of the plan would be to encourage employees to work at home on computers by changing some zoning laws restricting business in residential areas.

- Start tow-aways of illegally parked cars half an hour before the rush hour starts. Tow-aways that now begin at 7 a.m. would begin at 6:30 a.m., for example. Fines for left-turn violations would be increased from $64 to $100; penalties for motorists blocking intersections would be toughened. More traffic lights would be synchronized.

Both the traffic control plan and the background work on the LANCER project began in the mayor’s office weeks ago, and much of the work was done by a small group including legal counsel Mark Fabiani, planning aide Peter Rudolph and environmental aide John Stoddard.

Environmental Slant

But no action was taken for several weeks, coinciding with the last weeks of the reign of Deputy Mayor Tom Houston while a replacement was being selected. Earlier this month, Michael Gage, a former assemblyman who had managed Bradley’s 1985 reelection campaign, got the job. Like Houston, Gage is a strong environmentalist.

Gage said Bradley told him to move ahead with new plans. “If I had any direction, it was to be aggressively asserting ourselves on issues important to the city,” he said.

The LANCER decision showed the clear environmental slant of Bradley’s aides and, whether or not that was the intention, it was clearly pleasing to city environmentalists who had been unhappy with the mayor since he approved oil drilling at the Pacific Palisades beach.

For guidance, Fabiani said he went to such environmentally oriented organizations as the Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Environmental Defense Fund. He also said he studied whether residents in the district had been offered enough opportunity to protest the project.

‘Time to Call a Halt’

Noting that the mayor had previously said he would oppose LANCER if there was doubt about its safety, Fabiani said, “In view of the mayor’s position, I felt it was time for the mayor to call a halt.”

In following the advice of his immediate staff, Bradley ignored the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, which favored the plan. And, his action amounted to stopping in midstream a LANCER evaluation process that his administration had devised just weeks before.

In another development, Bradley disclosed at the press conference that the city has informally notified the International Olympics Committee that Los Angeles, host to the 1984 Games, will be able to host the 1988 Games if demonstration-torn Seoul, South Korea, is unable to handle them.