Ideas En Route : Students at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design attack L.A.’s traffic problems and come up with solutions that entice experts.

It’s just another ordinary afternoon of commuting on the San Bernardino Freeway. You’re sitting in gridlocked traffic watching your car overheat and you’re going to be late again because a radio report says an 18-wheeler a mile ahead missed the Duarte off ramp, jackknifed and is resting across three lanes of freeway. One of those lanes is yours. You look up. A sleek, silvery train is passing, high in the sky, gliding smoothly along an elevated monorail constructed over the freeway’s center divider. In a few minutes, another train passes. Then another. “Wait a minute,” you think. “I am in the wrong place.”

That scenario offers one solution to the traffic congestion in the Los Angeles area: Build a fast-moving, elevated transit system smack over commuters stuck in traffic.

The monorail, dubbed the San Bernardino Supertrain System, was one of four solutions to gridlock unveiled last week by students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Analyzing traffic is a departure for the Art Center, known worldwide for turning out cutting-edge automobile designers. But for the last three months, an advanced product design class has been examining Los Angeles area traffic problems.

The project, sponsored by the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), asked students to design entire transportation systems--with maximum mobility and minimum environmental impact--that could be implemented here over the next 15 years.

The key challenge was to lure commuters out of their comfortable cars.

“We wanted a system that would be user-friendly,” student Sakti Makki says of the San Bernardino Supertrain team. “Our research showed that 80% of the Los Angeles drivers have never even tried mass transit.”

And students had to be realistic in the process. “I didn’t want a clean-slate approach,” says instructor John Loftus. “They couldn’t wipe out the streets and freeways. They had to use existing or near-future technologies.”

At the same time, he didn’t want to see another batch of streamlined buses, subways or light-rail trains--systems that work well in cities with centralized downtowns, but not in fragmented Los Angeles.

“The students had to keep in mind that we are a car culture with a reluctance to use traditional mass-transit systems, partly because they don’t always work for us,” says Loftus. “We wanted to look at mass transportation from a different viewpoint.”

To reach that viewpoint his students had to digest the complexities of the Los Angeles basin, home to 12 million people, 8 million vehicles and some of the worst smog in the country. Its commuter traffic is estimated at 7.2 million car trips daily (projected to reach 10.3 million by 2010 if nothing changes) and 79% of those commuters are driving alone.

The designers researched existing mass transportation systems, long-range transit plans, advances in alternative fuel technology and current legislation, including Southern California’s Clean Air Act, a sweeping, 20-year plan to reduce pollution in the Los Angeles Basin.

The results were presented last week for evaluation and critique by a team of transportation experts, gathered in an Art Center classroom crammed with three-dimensional scale models accompanied by maps, charts, diagrams and sketches.

The student teams created unorthodox mix-and-match transit systems that were applauded for transcending the dreary transit image of waiting at a bus stop. They used the growing sophistication of electric vehicles, a wide application of computer technology, the city’s existing and future transit networks.

“I definitely give them high marks, from a planner’s perspective,” said Mark Yamarone, assistant transportation planner for the city of Burbank. “It’s like a breath of fresh air to see unencumbered creativity blossom like that. They have taken basic current research and parlayed it into fascinating ideas.”

Each of the four alternative transportation systems took a different approach, based on reactions to existing problems.

The plans:

* Group Four, the San Bernardino-to-Los Angeles Supertrain System, was designed for installation on raised tracks above existing freeway medians, providing important high visibility to commuters. Two separate electric trains would run simultaneously on the same track: upper express trains would stop at major stations and smaller “local” trains, suspended below, would stop at stations every three to four miles. Luxury business-class cars, equipped with phones, fax machines and comfortable work spaces, would provide a sensible alternative to sitting for an hour in a car on the freeway. “We want to get the guy out of his Beamer,” explains student Rob McCourt.

* Group Three students designed a passenger train that ferries cars. They looked at the projected light-rail transit system for the L.A. Basin, of which the Blue Line is the first leg, and designed a light-rail train that combines passenger seats on an upper level with drive-on berths for electrically powered commuter cars on the lower level. “In essence, the train is replacing the freeway,” says Michael Roneau. “Maybe you usually want to take the train to work because your office is only a block from the station, but occasionally you’ll need your car to make stops on the way home. You can take your choice.”

* Group Two, in deference to the Southern California car culture, designed a Personal Mass Transit System. “Mass transportation usually means trains, buses and light rail,” said student Jerome Goh, “but we define it as moving large amounts of people in record time, whatever the vehicle. We decided to use individual, small cars. They are efficient and environmentally pure.” The small, sleek vehicles, which can be driven manually on surface streets, are outfitted with magnetic sensors which allow them to “lock on” to a guidance system on an automated expressway. “Basically what we offer is an automated control on freeways, which will give us up to a 400% increase in traffic flow with computers,” said Goh.

* Group One looked at freeway systems that took 15 years to study and 10 years to build, at millions of dollars spent acquiring rights-of-way, at the sheer bulk of steel and concrete transportation systems, and opted for flexibility.

“Ours is mass-transit guerrilla warfare,” says Brandt Thompson of their Access Modular Transportation System. The basic component, a prefabricated modular track for electric vehicles, could be bolted down on existing streets almost overnight.

“It’s as cheap as possible and as fast as possible,” said Thompson. “The tracks can be rerouted, changed and modified, in response to traffic patterns.” The modularity extends to the electrically powered passenger cars which can be expanded or reduced as needed.”

The response to the Art Center presentations was positive. One visiting automotive expert said the students’ designs “put the ‘wow!’ factor into mass transit.”

“They did their research and are extremely well-prepared,” said Don Douty, an automotive engineer and chairman of design styling for the sponsoring AISI. “These plans could be made practical. The students are designers, not engineers, but they have nailed down the factors necessary to sell the general public on the merits of buying into their system, and to reduce the negative impact on the environment, particularly in Los Angeles.”

Burbank planner Mark Yamarone, noting that one student had referred to the “X factor” needed to lure people out of their cars, agrees that the new approaches have lots of appeal.

“Mass transit has to be sexy, it has to be attractive,” he says. “But the bottom line, which all those projects addressed, is time. They all presented a way to decrease commuting times and increase traffic flow. That’s the real functional side, and they’ve been able to package it.”

Will these innovative systems become part of the life of the Southern California commuter?

“I hope these ideas get carried out to a much larger audience,” says instructor Loftus. “I’d like to see them influencing what’s happening throughout the area.”

Alternative energy expert Michael Hackleman, who is launching a new magazine called “ATN: Alternative Transportation News,” says he will feature all four transit options in upcoming issues.

“We really don’t know what rapid transit can be,” he says. “It’s a lot different than a bus squirreling through traffic. I went in there with 15 years of transportation behind me, and saw lots of things that opened my eyes.

“I think the professional transportation planners in Southern California will want to see these ideas.”