Quake Exposed Need for Better Transit Systems

As state and local officials searched for lessons to be learned from the Bay Area earthquake, one stood out with stark clarity: California needs to develop a balanced transportation system and not continue to be almost completely dependent on the automobile. “Roads are what we know,” said Robert K. Best, Caltrans director. “We really do have to start emphasizing things we don’t know so well”--like trains, express buses and mass transit lines.

With the Oakland Bay Bridge closed, a portion of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed and other sections of the Bay Area highway and freeway system damaged, trains, ferries and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are “crucial to keeping the Bay Area functioning,” Best said.

BART, which has been carrying more than 300,000 riders a day, almost 100,000 more than in pre-earthquake times, “wasn’t designed to be an emergency transportation system but that’s the way it has been functioning,” he said.

“We learned that during a major earthquake, highways fall down and transit keeps going,” said Rod Diridon, chairman of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. “So it makes pretty good sense to put more of our money into transit.”

Besides the urgent need to develop balanced transportation systems, state and local agencies drew other lessons from the quake, including:

--The rehabilitation or replacement of unreinforced masonry buildings must be speeded up, because many of these structures collapsed, killing and injuring scores of people.

--The emergency flood plan of the State Department of Water Resources, which watches over California’s elaborate system of dams, levees and aqueducts, must be retooled to better handle non-flood emergencies.

The earthquake also has raised anew the broader issue of growth control.

Should California continue its current approach to growth, allowing new development to push into remote areas of the state that require enormous investments in roads, sewers, water facilities and other infrastructure? Or should there be a state plan, or a series of regional plans, directing growth into areas where services already exist?

Here, too, transportation is an issue.

Best said the state and federal governments cannot afford to provide all the freeways and highways that are needed to develop the Inland Empire or the undeveloped parts of Orange and San Diego counties.

“There are options out there that are better than what we built 50 or 60 or 70 years ago and we need to look at them,” he said.

Best’s call for a balanced transportation system struck some observers as ironic, because his boss, Gov. George Deukmejian, blasted the last Caltrans director who stressed that approach--Adriana Gianturco, who ran the transportation agency for former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

Mass Transit Promoted

In the early Deukmejian years, Caltrans concentrated on road-building and repair, but, since Best’s appointment in early 1988, the agency has been promoting intercity train service, high-speed buses on HOV (High-Occupancy Vehicle) lanes and light rail lines, as well as highway construction. The earthquake experience is expected to add momentum to that campaign.

Several transportation officials predicted that money would be shifted from new highway and freeway construction to the repair and upgrading of existing roads.

“It is likely that rehabilitation will be funded on a priority schedule,” said Robert Remen, executive director of the California Transportation Commission, which decides how much money will be spent on what projects.

But Remen said it is premature to say what priorities might be changed in the commission’s five-year transportation construction plan.

Much depends on how far the $1 billion in emergency federal highway funds approved by Congress and President Bush will stretch and how much emergency repair money the governor and the Legislature decide to spend. The Legislature has approved a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax for relief to victims of the earthquake.

State Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco) said the 24 transit agencies in the Bay Area failed to cooperate well after the earthquake and that he will introduce legislation to consolidate some of those agencies.

Best said “it would be really nice if people could buy one ticket that would let them ride anything” in the Bay Area but that few transfer systems exist among the various bus and rail systems.

However, Kopp warned that efforts to merge transit agencies “will be a long march” because “all those people are very independent and they don’t want to give up their offices.”

Kopp also said he hopes the earthquake experience would provide the needed push for another San Francisco Bay crossing, either a bridge or a tunnel, south of the Oakland Bay Bridge and north of the Richmond-San Mateo Bridge.

Larry Orman, director of the Greenbelt Alliance, an environmental group, said a clear lesson from the earthquake is that “San Francisco needs a major ferry system,” connecting the city to the East Bay and to Marin County. Some analysts believe the earthquake will provide a boost for regional planning, because some cities, counties and other governmental entities failed to cooperate in the aftermath of the quake.

Others think the crisis will focus attention on growth, with the possibility that government will play a more active role in guiding new development into areas that already have adequate roads, sewers and water works rather than to open spaces that lack such facilities.

“There will be a broad debate about how the Bay Area develops, about housing and open space, jobs and development,” predicted Larry Orman of the Greenbelt Alliance.

Some of this debate will take place in the deliberations of a blue-ribbon group called Bay Vision 2020, which will engage in the same kind of planning process that led to the Los Angeles 2000 report.

Joseph Bodovitz, president of the California Environmental Trust, said he hoped for such a debate.

“Will this lead to more pressure for urban sprawl?” Bodovitz asked. “Will people see that as the way to escape” future earthquake damage? “Or will there be greater attention to the availability of roads, water, landfill space and other infrastructure needs” before new developments are approved by local governing bodies?

Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, said the earthquake provides “an opportunity to bring back to the table the issue of just how much at the margin our infrastructure is operating” and how much needs to be done to rebuild it if life in California is to be sustainable.

State water officials generally were pleased with the way California’s elaborate system of dams, levees and aqueducts held up.

Four small dams in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties were damaged but both the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project survived intact. Damage to the vast levee system in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was light.

“There were predictions that an earthquake of this magnitude would devastate the system,” said Edward Huntley, chief of planning for the State Department of Water Resources. “Fortunately, it did not.”

However, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ flood control experts said the water level in Folsom Lake, a large reservoir on the American River above Sacramento, might have to be kept low because of fear that an auxiliary dam could fail in a future quake.

Levees Examined

Also, engineers from the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies much of Southern California’s water, flew to Northern California to survey the aged peat and sand levees. A major break in those levees could easily cause salt water to flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in such large quantities that its water would be unusable either for San Joaquin Valley agriculture or for Southern California drinking.

Although the state’s major water works survived, local distribution systems in Santa Cruz and a few other cities were heavily damaged, causing disruption of service.

“It doesn’t do much good to have a six-month supply of water in the reservoirs if you can’t move it through the mains,” a Metropolitan Water District official said.

Jim Coe, chief of flood operations in the State Department of Water Resources, said most of that agency’s emergency procedures worked well but there was some confusion about who was responsible for what in this “non-flood emergency.”

The quake will not lead state and local officials to seek major building code changes because the things that happened were expected: high-rise structures swayed but did not collapse, while unreinforced masonry buildings did collapse, sometimes with devastating consequences.

“The lesson is that we have a pretty good code,” said Warren O’Brien, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. “After each quake, we generally improve the code. This quake didn’t identify any (new) problems.’

In recent years, Los Angeles has pushed to bring older buildings, particularly the remaining 1,500 unreinforced masonry structures, up to current earthquake safety standards.

With this in mind, Mayor Tom Bradley and State Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) have called for a ballot proposition to provide $90 million in loans to help bring masonry apartment buildings--most of them in low-income neighborhoods--up to code.

City Councilwoman Gloria Molina urged passage of a city ordinance that would allow tenants in unreinforced masonry buildings to place their rents in an escrow account. The money would be used to pay for the renovations if landlords refused to do so.

In Sacramento, Democratic legislators noted that Deukmejian vetoed a bill that would have allowed the formation of special assessment districts to bring private buildings up to current earthquake safety standards.

The city of Santa Cruz had requested the legislation so that owners of downtown buildings could afford to upgrade their structures. But the governor said this was an inappropriate use of the special assessment district concept.

The district could not have been established in time to help the many downtown Santa Cruz buildings that collapsed in the quake, these legislators pointed out.

“Technically, we did not learn a lot new from this earthquake,” said Michael J. Bocchicchio, the state architect.

But Bocchicchio noted that several state buildings in Oakland and San Francisco were so badly damaged they had to be closed and said, “we need a mandated state program, with a lot more money, to bring these buildings up to code” at a faster rate.

State education officials said the upgrading of classrooms to meet earthquake safety standards paid off because only eight out of 1,500 schools in the earthquake area suffered serious structural damage. Total cost of repairing school damage is estimated at $40 million to $60 million.

Repairs of UC buildings on the Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Cruz campuses probably will run around $40 million, officials said, while damage to California State University System campuses is estimated at between $15 million and $45 million.

Some education analysts believe a more important consequence of the earthquake may be increased pressure to rehabilitate campus buildings, instead of building the three new campuses UC wants, the six campuses being sought by CSU and the 16 new campuses the community college system wants.