Getting ‘Smart’ Can Double Freeway Load, Official Says

Smart vehicles, smart roads and smart users could double the capacity of existing freeways in Orange County and throughout the state, Caltrans Director Robert K. Best said Wednesday.

“Every freeway out there that is running right at capacity, but still running freely, has the capacity to carry double the load,” Best told 43 people at a Town Hall of California luncheon at the Red Lion Inn in Costa Mesa.

“We can’t build our way out of a lot of the major transportation problems, particularly in urban areas,” Best said.

“We’ve got to get smart in the use of the system. We’ve got to look at getting ourselves smart vehicles; we’ve got to have smart roads, and we’ve got to have smart users. . . . We don’t have to sit here and say there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s stew in our own carbon monoxide.”

Although it sounds like “Star Wars” or “Buck Rogers,” Best said, in the future people will drive cars with navigation systems that can communicate with computers about traffic and road conditions, plot the most efficient routes, link together with other vehicles to save space on freeways and be guided by a “beam” or “track” laid in the roadbed.

The state Department of Transportation is funding additional research into automated roads and electrified vehicles. Although computerized, electrified cars already exist, Best said, there is no program to merge them into the highway network. The result now, he said, is “a dumb chunk of concrete” whenever a new road or freeway is opened to traffic.

Smart users, Best said, are those who make “good, solid economic choices about using the system,” such as traveling when highways are not crowded and following routes that are “least likely to be jammed up during a given period of time.”

“The ‘in’ people who know the routes and know the system have all of this in their head,” Best said, “and they know how to use a little bitty piece of the freeway, use back streets and a quick thoroughfare across town so that they can cut a 25-minute trip down to 7 or 8 minutes by studying the process and knowing about the time of day and how to use it.

“The average person out there can’t,” Best said. “But there’s a capability of putting the same level of smartness into the average person if we could get the information systems and the technology up and operating.”

Decisions Decentralized

The fact that people are upset with the way government is handling traffic problems is partly due to the piecemeal way transportation funding is controlled by so many different government agencies, Best said.

“In my opinion, we spend about twice as much money for about half of the result that we could get if we could integrate the programs and the government structure so that we could have this all working together toward a common goal of increasing the mobility of people and goods,” he said.

Best predicted that the state Legislature may soon place a transportation funding measure, such as an increase in the gasoline tax, before voters, but it will be “a very hard sell” without assurances to voters that innovative projects will be replacing the transportation programs of the 1940s and 1950s that are still in use today.

Otherwise, Best said, “we will have people saying, ‘Hey, I don’t mind the earthquakes, but I can’t stand the congestion.’ ”

Best and his staff put together a controversial plan earlier this year that would, if it became law, create benefit-assessment districts within state highway corridors to help finance traffic and transit improvements. Regional corridor councils would decide how the money would be spent and assign priorities to traffic improvement projects.

Identifying Solutions

After his Town Hall remarks, Best acknowledged that local governments are nervous about the proposal. But he insisted that it would not take land-use planning out of the hands of locally elected officials. Instead, Best said, such new structures would enable Caltrans to better identify solutions to traffic problems.

“If I have $250 million to spend, I’ll spend it on a new freeway lane because that’s (legally) all I can spend it on,” Best said. “But maybe the best traffic solution at that location is not another freeway lane but rather the widening of a local arterial street. Or maybe a rail line down part of that particular corridor. The way things are done now, I can’t do anything about it.”

Fielding questions from the audience, Best defended car-pool lanes as effective once they are linked to a full system of such lanes. He said he doubted whether businesses can afford, on a year-round basis, the work shift changes and nighttime truck delivery schedules that reduced traffic during the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Best was appointed director of Caltrans in February by Gov. George Deukmejian. He was chief deputy director of Caltrans from 1973 to 1976 before joining the Pacific Legal Foundation as deputy director.