Caltrans Chief Bemoans a Lack of Vision

California Transportation Director Robert K. Best acknowledged Wednesday that political leaders have no coordinated vision of how the state’s transportation system should be developed to meet the monumental traffic congestion problems of the present and future.

Best, during a wide-ranging interview with the Times Sacramento Bureau, said state transportation officials are considering innovative approaches, such as constructing private toll roads, double-decking freeways and erecting mass-transit systems above or below freeway roadbeds because they believe building more freeways is not the only answer.

Best said a gasoline tax increase would help but not cure the state’s transportation problems. He also criticized the $3 billion spent to build the Century Freeway project.

The Caltrans director said that state, federal and local policy-makers today lack the vision that transportation planners had in the 1940s and ‘50s, when the state freeway and federal interstate highway systems were being developed.

“(Today) we build whatever we can get money for. If there is a pot of money out there, we design a transportation system to suck in that money,” Best said.

The Caltrans director, a veteran of the department who was appointed to the top job by Gov. George Deukmejian last year, said an example of that is the Century Freeway from Los Angeles International Airport to Norwalk. He readily acknowledged, however, that in criticizing the project, he had the benefit of hindsight.

“Say we got a group together at a table and said, ‘How are we going to spend $3 billion to improve transportation in the Los Angeles area?’ ” Best said. “The only group that would come out of that meeting proposing the Century Freeway would be a group of orangutans. That’s just not how we would spend $3 billion to improve transportation in Los Angeles.”

Best said that during the dramatic expansion of the transportation system in the ‘40s and ‘50s, political leaders were able to agree on what was needed. That is not the case today, he said.

“We don’t have a clear vision about how to deal with transportation,” Best said.

Best said Deukmejian, who next month will meet with state business, labor and political leaders for what is being billed as a transportation “summit,” hopes to change that by reaching some kind of consensus.

Commenting on gasoline tax proposals in the Legislature that would raise from $16 billion to $21 billion over the next decade, Best said the money would not completely solve the state’s transportation problems, but it would do a “fair” job of meeting the most basic needs.

Currently, Best said the State Transportation Improvement Program, a $16-billion blueprint for transportation expenditures over the next five years, is updated each year, beginning at the local level. Cities and counties feed proposed projects into regional agencies, which forward them to the state. The state sets priorities on projects submitted by local governments and then incorporates them in the five-year plan.

This approach, Best said, is flawed. He said a better way would be to “start from the end result” and ask the question, “What is it we think we ought to be trying to achieve?”

As for private toll roads, a controversial issue in California, although they are accepted in other states and parts of Europe, Best said he is open to the idea.

He said there are places in California that he thinks would support toll roads.

“From my perspective, I see no reason why not (to have them),” Best said.

The Caltrans director said his department has already done some preliminary evaluations of possible private tolls roads that could be built in the Los Angeles area just “to see whether or not this whole idea is feasible.” He said he thinks it is, although there are no concrete proposals.

He said one possibility is leasing the airspace above freeways to private concerns, which could double-deck the road and charge a fee to drive on it. Once the private company achieved a return on its investment, he said, the highway would become public and its operation transferred to a government agency.

Best said, “We have talked with some of the major engineering firms about the feasibility of it, and they have told us it is feasible.”

He identified one of the firms as Bechtel Civil Inc., a subsidiary of Bechtel Group Inc.

Intense Opposition

Recalling the intense opposition in the San Fernando Valley to specially designated car-pool lanes on the Ventura Freeway, Best said none of the new proposals should be forced on communities that do not want them.

“Many of these solutions become questions of community acceptance, because if a community feels that it would rather live with the congestion than accept an alternative process that will help it, I don’t feel it’s the role of the state to go in and say, ‘To hell with you; we’re going to pave over you anyway,’ ” he said.

He supported Deukmejian’s position that any gas tax increase should be subject to a statewide referendum, not merely legislative approval as Senate and Assembly leaders are proposing.

“The real question about going back to the voters is just a fundamental one,” Best said. “Do you lay out to the voters that this is what’s going on (with a tax increase)--or do you try to sucker the voters with something that says, ‘Just modify the (state spending) limit, but we’re not going to tell you what we’re going to do when you modify it.’ ”