TV REVIEW : How to Free Up the Freeways

If you think freeways are a drag now, you should hear what experts say they’ll be like in 20 years.

Life in the fast lane will be virtually extinct as the average rush-hour speed will sink to a very un-Californian 11 m.p.h.

Half of all driving time will be spent sitting in traffic, the experts project, thanks in large part to the fact that there will likely be 5 million people added to the 15 million already sharing the Southern California life style. And spending billions on mass transit systems and the new Century Freeway won’t help much either.

For 90 minutes tonight, “Stuck in Traffic,” a special edition of “KCET Journal” hosted by Jeffrey Kaye, looks closely at this worsening traffic jam and at some long-range solutions proposed by the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG), the regional planning agency.

KCET’s report, which includes an in-studio “town meeting” of 35 area politicians, businessmen and transportation experts, examines how SCAG hopes to persuade the region’s 160 local governments to agree on and fund a scheme that will radically change most people’s commuting habits.

SCAG’s strategy to reduce daily commuter trips by 4 million includes ride-sharing, van-pooling and High Occupancy Vehicle lanes (the new term for Diamond Lanes), more mass transit use, telecommuting (working from home by computer) and encouraging the development of housing policies that create a better “job-housing balance” so that people live closer to their work and keep off freeways (though commuters compose only half of all freeway traffic).

“Stuck in Traffic,” produced by Martin Burns and written by Burns and Isabel Storey, is informative and often very interesting. At the town meeting (which suffers from having about 25 too many participants) there are occasional flashes of insight and even occasional heresy, mostly from the few non-politicians (the verboten word “toll” even whistles by).

An exchange over the no-growth issue is feisty, balanced and satisfying. But overall there is precious little skepticism of SCAG’s gloom-foreseeing experts, of their ability to accurately predict (an inevitably unpredictable) future, or of the limitations or dangers of long-range regional planning.

Also, in the zeal to solve the traffic problem, there’s an unsettling and mostly unquestioned consensus that what is needed are more government mandates and requirements and authority and management. “We have to be willing to say that we’re going to make people change their behavior,” says SCAG transportation planner Roger Riga. “Just asking them to do so probably won’t work.”

No one challenged that statement, and several others that were similar but less chilling were largely ignored. However, when Kaye asked how many of those at the town meeting regularly used car pools or took the bus, the result was interesting: Of the 35, three car-pooled and one took the bus.