Now Let’s Shake Up Our Highway Priorities : Transportation: We didn’t need a major quake to tell us that our roads need upkeep and our transit options need to be broadened. But it sure reinforced the message.

In the area of transportation, the Oct. 16 Bay Area earthquake made two things clear for California. We need to put a high priority on repairing and upgrading existing highways, even if that means sacrificing funds for new roads. And just as important, we need a balanced system that provides alternate ways of getting around.

Existing state highways--about 16,000 miles of them--carry most of California’s traffic, most of the time. Ten years ago the cost of replacing the whole system was estimated at $50 billion, a figure that would obviously be considerably higher today.

Maintaining the roads we have, rebuilding them when they wear out and improving them to modern standards just makes good economic sense. It’s called protecting your investment. And, as the earthquake showed, when existing roads fail, it’s not just an investment that is lost. Prolonged disruption of daily life, not to mention loss of life itself, can be the result.

So what are we spending on earthquake-proofing and other forms of highway rehabilitation, and what kind of emphasis has the state been putting on this type of activity? A look at the history of the earthquake retrofit program is instructive.

That program started in 1971, during Ronald Reagan’s second term as governor, after the Sylmar earthquake. For the remainder of Reagan’s term, an average of $1.9 million a year was spent on strengthening state highways to withstand shocks greater than those for which they were initially designed.

By the time Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. took office, the retrofit program was in full swing, and for the next eight years its budget averaged $3.2 million annually. Significantly, this increase was accomplished without the benefit of any enhancement in overall highway revenues.

In the spring of 1983, gas taxes went up by a hefty chunk: 7 cents a gallon (an occurence that’s being studiously ignored in the current push for ballot approval next June of a new 9-cents-a-gallon hike). The 1983 increase, coupled with higher fees on truck weights and other road-related revenues, swelled the state’s highway budget by about $1.2 billion annually--from an average of about $1.5 billion a year in the final six years of the Brown Administration to an average of about $2.7 billion a year in the past six years of the George Deukmejian Administration.

But the effect of this financial bonanza on the earthquake retrofit program was minimal. Retrofit expenditures in the Deukmejian era have averaged $3.7 million a year--about $400,000 more per year than before the gas-tax increase. And to date, says Caltrans, it has completed only the first phase of what was envisioned as a three-phrase program.

The larger highway rehabilitation effort has been receiving 15% of the new funds--not a very big slice, but enough to nearly double the dollars earmarked for what has historically been a very lean item in the highway budget.

Where did the rest of the new money go? Day-to-day maintenance (fixing potholes, picking up litter and so forth) garnered 19% of the increase; modifications to existing roads (such as left-turn lanes and ramp meters) took up 9%, and assorted minor programs accounted for another 4%. The lion’s share of the new tax proceeds--53%--has been devoted, predictably, to building new highways. (It’s worth noting that, at costs exceeding $50 million or even $100 million per mile built, this has had little appreciable effect on reducing congestion.)

In just about any contest over how to spend transportation money, the building of new roads has it hands down over doing other things with the highway system or devoting resources to alternate types of transportation. The reasons are simple: New roads mean access to property, and land-development interests are aligned in organized and vocal constituencies, generous with political contributions, and not shy about letting elected officials and policy-makers know how they think available tax money should be parceled out.

Absent major problems--like those caused by an earthquake--the annoyance of a pothole here or a crack there isn’t likely to spur the average motorist (or the average editorial writer, for that matter) into vigorous lobbying for the cause of road repair and upgrading. Lobbying comes naturally to developers and others when they’re advocating new highway construction. It’s been only recently that demand for transit has burgeoned into an effective public force, mounted through organizations that have an interest in and are capable of pushing for transit dollars as persistently as new-highway proponents.

And what has the earthquake taught us about the value of mass transit? It was mass transit that kept the Bay Area functioning after the disaster. Had the region’s transportation system not included BART (on which ridership jumped from more than 200,000 to about 350,000 trips a day), commuter trains from the peninsula and various bus lines, the quake’s impact would have been many times more severe. The quake made it obvious, if it wasn’t before, that our transportation system--no less than our economy, or the structure of our energy supply--should be diversified. Diversification means resilience; lack of it means vulnerability.

The quake also showed that a transportation network in which the relative importance of the highway element is reduced can operate satisfactorily if people not only use transit but if they also car pool and if their working hours are shifted and staggered. There are many good reasons to modify travel behavior in these respects, earthquakes or not. Cleaning up the air and alleviating congestion are two of the more compelling of these reasons.

We didn’t need an earthquake to tell us that it’s time to get serious about taking better care of the roads we have and about creating a truly balanced transportation system. It’s up to ordinary citizens to insist that this will happen, whether transportation taxes rise again or not.