To Unlock Freeways, Politicians Must Act : Sacramento Should Look at the Task Ahead and Fund It With a 5-Cent Gas-Tax Increase

California is choking on its own traffic. And as a card-carrying member of the fraternity of federal, state and local elected officials, I must admit: It’s our fault.

While vehicles have multipled on the state’s roads and freeways, politicians in Washington and Sacramento and local governments everywhere have pontificated and whined and argued and studied everything concerning transportation.

We’ve come up with just about everything but specific, comprehensive solutions. That might require us to make some hard and unpopular decisions.

There have been numerous stopgap, Band-Aid proposals--a minor tax increase here, a bond issue there--designed more to mollify an increasingly restive motoring public than to address the underlying problems.

But the voters must share some of the blame for our sorry transportation situation, too.

Poll after poll shows the public listing transportation as the No. 1 or No. 2 problem facing California. Poll after poll also shows people willing to fork over no more thanan extra penny or two at the gas pump in the expectation that it will solve all their driving problems.

It won’t. Billion-dollar bond issues and 2-cent tax increases are like so many spitballs thrown at a battleship. It’s going to take a lot more money, innovative and integrated planning and a large portion of personal and political sacrifice to do anything about the transportation mess.

It’s also going to mean that Californians and their political leaders are going to have to shake off years of dust and cobwebs. The last state gas tax increase--2 cents--was six years ago, and its benefits were soon wiped out by both more fuel-efficient vehicles and by inflation. Before then the gas tax had not been increased since 1963. Given our past track record, doing nothing is the early odds-on favorite this time around, too. The overriding approach for politicians is reminiscent of a little boy reasoning with the splinter in his finger: It will hurt to take it out, so let’s leave it alone and maybe it will cure itself.

Some of us are ashamed of that attitude. We’re proposing what we think is a sound, sensible and sweeping plan to address California’s transportation problems. Its major elements include:

--Requiring local elected officials to reduce urban congestion in their areas by 25% over the next five years. If they did, they would get more state money for road construction and repairs.

--Linking future development with needed transportation improvements so that growth in one area would not cause congestion in another.

--Offsetting the increasing burden on air quality caused by more traffic by paying for urban reforestation projects and buying and preserving greenbelts.

--Giving more money to mass-transit systems while requiring them to be more efficient.

--Providing enough money to meet all of the state’s highway construction plans for the next decade.

--Streamlining the bureaucratic procedures that currently bog down road planning and construction.

To pay for it, we would raise the gasoline tax by a nickel a gallon and raise commercial truck-weight fees by 30%, then tie increases over the next decade to the rate of inflation.

And here’s the really innovative part: Elected officials would have to take the responsibility to approve and carry out the proposal.

Voters would be asked to do their part by changing the state Constitution to modify the current government spending limit. That would keep the overall spending limit in place but allow us to spend the extra road dollars. Voters, however, would not be asked directly to approve a tax increase. That’s our job. It’s time to stop running like frightened wild beasts to the voters every time we face an issue of substance.

Government by initiative is generally a sorry spectacle. The questions posed by initiatives are almost always poorly drafted and confusing, and sometimes deliberately misleading and dishonest.

It’s a wrongheaded and politically cowardly way to run this state. Elected officials have to come to grips with the problems that they are paid salaries to solve.

“A leader has to lead,” Harry Truman said, “or otherwise he has no business in politics.”

We have to deal with California’s transportation problems now, in the most comprehensive and effective way we can.

If we can’t do that, as elected officials, we should seek other employment.