The Big Fix : The Experts Say We Have a Choice: A Future of Gridlock of a High-Tech System That Will Keep Us Moving but Will Also Change Forever the Way We Drive

EVERY DAY, TRAFFIC REPORTERS YAMmer across the Los Angeles airwaves: SigAlert on the 405. Accident working on the Hollywood. Backup on the San Bernardino. Slowdown at the Santa Monica-Harbor interchange. The same 100 words, mixed and matched, pulsed out in neon tones, hour after hour. It’s as if the daily refrain calls the cars, like pilgrims to prayer, into bumper-to-bumper genuflection on the freeways.

Traffic jams now last most of the working day in Los Angeles. Blood pressure, tension and anger accelerate as too many cars fight for too little space. Hydrocarbon emissions surge. Reined-in engines going nowhere burn millions of gallons of gas. Freeway congestion costs California $5 billion a year in lost productivity and wasted energy. If nothing changes, in 15 years the bill will rise to $20 billion, and the average freeway speed will drop to 11 miles per hour. You could bicycle faster.

If nothing changes.

As urban commuters everywhere peer into a dark future of gridlock, a band of transportation gurus from across the country is proposing a different scenario: a high-tech triumvirate of “smart” highways, vehicles and travelers that will put 50% more vehicles on the freeways and keep them moving. It’s called the Intelligent Vehicle/ Highway System.

“We’ve known for a long time that we had to apply technology to the system in order to get it to work better,” says John Vostrez, chief of research and technology at the California Department of Transportation. “We just can’t put in more freeways.”

Vostrez and other traffic experts say IVHS requires no revolutionary technological advances, just evolutionary applications. Within 20 years, smart highways, cars and drivers could be commonplace in many cities, they say. Parts of IVHS are already on line in Southern California; the rest of it is on the drawing board or in prototype.

It’s a system with sci-fi touches and Big Brother overtones. Automated computerized cars and highways will allow platoons of cars, separated by only a few feet, to zoom along at 90 m.p.h. while their drivers read the newspaper. Omniscient and omnipotent traffic controllers--human and computer--will track information from flying cameras and thousands of other highway sensors, orchestrating and controlling freeway entry, car speeds and routing. And a new breed of travelers will monitor this traffic information--so detailed that it’s essentially personalized--at home, at work, in the mall, everywhere, to find the best way to get from here to there.

But IVHS has its drawbacks. One is economic: It will require $35 billion to set up in major metropolitan areas nationwide during the next 20 years, and individual automobile costs will rise. Another is political: IVHS calls for an unprecedented alliance among state and federal governments, private enterprise and academia. And the third is cultural: Each traveler’s personal needs will become secondary to keeping the system as a whole functioning efficiently. IVHS will chip away at a treasured Southern California birthright--the freedom to choose when, where and how to roam the freeways. On top of all this, IVHS won’t be able to bring back the days when we could drive the 60 miles from Canoga Park to Disneyland in 60 minutes.

But the traffic gurus are adamant. The Intelligent Vehicle/ Highway System is the only way to keep things moving. Traditional L.A. freeway life will soon be dead, relegated to the realm of nostalgia. For the future, they say, think one word: smart .

JOHN VOSTREZ LOOKED around at the members of Mobility 2000, 250 of the nation’s most forward-thinking transportation engineers, planners and researchers. In Dallas for a little-publicized March, 1990, conference, they were sitting down for lunch on the second of three days of meetings, tired but exuberant.

The conference marked a turning point for Mobility 2000, an ad hoc volunteer organization. In these three days, its members would develop a blueprint for the Intelligent Vehicle/ Highway System to present to the nation’s bureaucrats and politicians. They would spend hours in committee meetings “sucking on each other’s brains,” according to one participant. They would look in near stupefaction at time lines that stretched from 1986 to 2015, the research, development and birthing years of IVHS. They would argue for hours about how to implement IVHS, how to coordinate its parts and how to estimate its costs.

This lunch was the halfway point in the conference, and the participants were convinced that the blueprint was shaping up: Their efforts to jump-start a new national transportation program would pay off. But Vostrez was not so sure. A big man with gray hair, he had an air of weariness that came from too many years of trying to make people think about the future. His colleagues’ high spirits bounced off him. Vostrez was afraid all this was 20 years too late.

Mobility 2000 had begun with a handful of California traffic specialists, including Vostrez. They had predicted the growing mess on the state’s urban highways--the engineers who designed California’s freeways in the 1950s had expected overcapacity within 30 years. They knew that more freeways weren’t the answer. There was simply no room. Mass transit wouldn’t solve the problem either. In a city like Los Angeles, population and development patterns couldn’t support mass transit on the scale needed to solve freeway congestion.

But, they believed, if technology was brought to bear on the problem, the capacity of the state’s freeways could be doubled, maybe even tripled, and everyone would move faster. Developing high-tech answers to the traffic problem would require an all-out research-and-development effort. But the entities that could organize and pay for such a program--the state and federal governments--had for years ignored the worsening situation. “It takes 20 years to apply technology from the time you want to start,” Vostrez says. “It was absolutely frustrating.”

With that in mind, Howard Ross, a transportation specialist who had helped start the Program on Advanced Technology for the Highway at UC Berkeley, organized a meeting of about 25 of his colleagues. “At the end of that 1988 meeting,” says Ross, “came the name Mobility 2000”--and the determination to spread the word across the country: Computers and communications had to replace concrete.

The scheme that Mobility 2000 had in mind resembled a terrestrial version of the nation’s air-traffic control system. The Dallas blueprint divided IVHS into three parts: The Advanced Traffic Management System, which would monitor and control traffic flow via computers, sensors and communications; the Advanced Traveler Information System, the link between drivers and the management system, and the Advanced Vehicle Control System, a combination of high-tech vehicles and roadways.

The group knew that it was not alone in pursuing such systems. Both Europe and Japan were working on IVHS. In 1986, Europe began an eight-year, $600-million smart-car program, involving 15 car makers, 105 electronics firms and 90 research institutes. A related program addressing roadway infrastructure allotted $80 million to 1,100 researchers. Japan had sunk an estimated $1.3 billion into its efforts.

Part of the message hammered into the Dallas blueprint was that the United States had to move now or lose yet another automotive competitive edge. “Europe and Japan have their problems,” says Steve Shladover, technical director of Berkeley’s PATH. “Europe is very, very bureaucratic. The Japanese programs are hamstrung by turf battles between government ministries. It’s possible for the United States to catch up. But if we wait, two, three, four years, we will lose the opportunity.”

In 1990, the federal budget for IVHS research was a paltry $3.5 million. With blueprint in hand, Mobility 2000 members began to lobby, and in 1991, the Department of Transportation increased IVHS funding to $20 million. DOT hopes to raise that amount to $100 million annually by 1994. Efforts in individual states, plus research being conducted by private companies, probably amount to another $20 million for 1991. California has made the biggest commitment to IVHS, spending $12.5 million during the past four years.

Late last year, the volunteers of Mobility 2000 disbanded to create a new organization, IVHS America Inc. With the change came a budget, a staff and a mission to coordinate the efforts of private industry, research organizations and government agencies in developing IVHS. The new organization also took on the job of explaining to politicians and the public the implications of a high-tech transportation future. The truth is that transportation is now a commodity, says Vostrez, Ross and almost every other transportation expert. It’s a scarce commodity. Like all scarce commodities, it’s expensive and hard to get. IN THE BRAVE, NEW FREEWAY World, there will definitely be a Big Brother, a computerized master traffic controller that will act as the electronic heart and mind of the Advanced Traffic Management System, the first part of the IVHS technological triumvirate. One of its early incarnations is called FRED--Freeway Real-Time Expert System Demonstration. FRED is the creation of Stephen Ritchie, a civil engineer and researcher at UC Irvine’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

“We’re talking about an artificial intelligence system here,” Ritchie says. “What we’re trying to do is capture the expertise, judgment and knowledge of the best traffic controllers and put it into a computer program.”

FRED is designed to mastermind the nascent smart-traffic-control systems already operating in California. Eventually, this computer program will mature into a massive electronic web that will monitor tens of thousands of freeway and surface-street sensors. Right now, FRED resides in Ritchie’s laboratory, a small, fluorescent-lighted room crammed with desks and computers. To design FRED, Ritchie and his graduate students observed and interviewed traffic controllers at the Caltrans Freeway Traffic Operations Center in downtown Los Angeles.

There, in a semi-dark “Star Wars”-style control room, operators monitor 5,000 sensors in 934 locations on 700 miles of freeway. The sensors, buried in the roadway, convey “occupancy rates”--a high occupancy rate equals a traffic jam--onto a lighted map. Controllers respond to stalls and “incidents”--anything other than overcapacity that disrupts traffic--by calling out police and emergency-response teams, regulating on-ramp meters and sending rush-hour bulletins to drivers via freeway signs.

There are two other control centers in Southern California--one that monitors and regulates stoplights on downtown L.A. surface streets and one in Anaheim that focuses on congestion around the convention center and stadium. Another freeway control center is being built in Santa Ana.

As sophisticated as these centers are, IVHS planners say that as traffic increases, controllers will need more information. Additional sensors must be installed, and the freeway and surface-street monitoring systems must be linked so that controllers in both kinds of facilities get a complete picture. But more sensors and a linked system mean more data. More vehicles on the roadways mean more accidents. Both will become too much for humans to deal with alone.

“We fear the operator won’t be able to cope,” Ritchie says. “With enormous amounts of data coming in from arterial streets as well as freeways, and multiple incidents, that’s where the operator has cognition overload. There’s a need for automatic decision support.”

FRED--and ultimately its more complex successors--will use computerized artificial intelligence, which has limited decision-making abilities but can absorb vast amounts of data, to augment the real intelligence of a human traffic operator, who can make--and take responsibility for--decisions, but absorb far less data.

FRED concentrates on incidents, not overcapacity. It will continuously filter information from the sensors. When it detects a slowdown caused by an accident, it will alert the controller, who will use remote-controlled cameras or a source at the scene to confirm the report. On a computer, the controller will record the details on a form that FRED provides: Three lanes blocked. A substance spilling out of an overturned truck. Possible injuries.

Then the controller can push a button, and FRED will take over. For instance, it might call to the scene a helicopter ambulance, the highway patrol and a hazardous materials team.

With split-second delivery, FRED could shut down the on-ramps leading to the scene of the accident, light freeway message boards, figure out detours, and broadcast the information. The operator, who used to have to do all the things that FRED is taking care of, is free to manage the incident and update FRED with more information as the incident unfolds.

In Ritchie’s lab, FRED has mastered appropriate responses to every situation that has been defined, but it’s still spotty at differentiating between slowdowns caused by accidents and those caused by mere overcrowding. Still, Ritchie says, FRED is likely to debut in a year at the Caltrans District 12 Orange County Freeway Traffic Operations Center in Santa Ana. About two years after that, Anaheim plans to incorporate FRED in its management of surface streets, and shortly thereafter, the two systems will be connected.

AT THE MOBILITY 2000 MEETING in Dallas last year, there was grumbling in the halls. Mass-transit advocates, latecomers to the organization, used the word traveler in reports about advanced-information systems for the public. They saw the systems as more than fancy in-car computers delivering information about alternate routes and freeway congestion. They thought that a wide variety of transportation information--mass-transit schedules and routing, for example--should be provided to all travelers, whether they used cars, buses, taxis or bicycles. But auto-industry representatives kept changing the word traveler to driver , and all the conference reports ended up referring to Advanced Driver Information Systems.

The system’s projected ability to put more cars on the freeways is what critics like least about IVHS. Some transportation planners charge that the system is merely a way for Detroit to sell more cars. They point to the plan’s substantial cost--research and development through the year 2010 is estimated at $1.4 billion, field tests at $3.1 billion and deployment at $30 billion--and say there are better ways to reduce traffic congestion: Force commuters out of their cars with higher parking fees, tolls and taxes. Charge to drive during rush hours. Give light rail, subways, buses and trains a chance to show their stuff.

Adib Kanafani, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, sighs at the mass-transit question. “Mass transit has become a religious thing. Are you for it or against it? But you have to understand it.” You have to understand, for example, why it works in some places but not in others. Why it works in New York and European cities, where population densities are high, but not in many cities west of the Mississippi, where growth followed freeway sprawl into the wide-open spaces.

“Mass transit cannot exist alone,” says Wilfred Recker, director of UC Irvine’s Institute of Transportation Studies. “The rail line between Long Beach and Los Angeles needs something at either end. With advanced technology, public transit communicates with the motor vehicle system; public transit and personal vehicles are complementary.”

During the past year, Mobility 2000’s car and mass-transit factions combined to devise a stunning idea that may satisfy everyone: Use the Advanced Traveler Information System to make the automobile a mass-transit vehicle.

One set of numbers shows how this might work. The average occupancy of vehicles in Los Angeles is 1.19 people per car. If that increased to 1.75, there would be a 50% to 75% reduction in traffic delays. But, says Robert Behnke, an Oregon-based transportation consultant, “traditional car-pooling just doesn’t work. It requires too much planning. And if something happens to your ride, you have no alternative.”

Behnke’s solution is called “parataxi” and would work something like this: You and the thousands of others who work near you in urban high-rises have joined--and been screened by--a computerized car-pooling network. When you want to leave workat 5 p.m., and you have three extra seats in your car, you tap into the network. After all, if you fill at least two, the system awards you a discount on that day’s parking fee, and you may travel in the high-occupancy lane for a faster trip home. You tell a user-friendly computer in your office your destination and departure location and time.

At least two people among the thousands checking the system for rides are going to addresses near yours. The computer makes the connection, records their names and the match is made, with the meeting time and place indicated. When the passengers leave your car, they pass a card over a “reader,” which records the ride-share so that you get the appropriate credit. Behnke, working with Caltrans, is about to test this idea and others as part of TRIPS--the Transportation Resources Information Processing System. At six test sites--three in Southern California--travelers will be able to tap into services ranging from a telephone recording of bus schedules between specific map points to the more sophisticated parataxi service. Caltrans is looking for a college campus in Los Angeles on which to set up a parataxi service; a similar system may be installed in San Diego.

At last month’s meeting of IVHS America, the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which is partially funding California’s TRIPS efforts, announced its plan to use advanced navigation, information and communications systems to enhance traditional public transit as well as ride-sharing for private cars. And IVHS America representatives consistently referred to its constituents as travelers instead of drivers .

IN THE HIGH-OCCUPANCY LANE of I-15 in San Diego, two cars speed along, one hugging the bumper of the other. The first car accelerates. So does the second. The first car slows. The second follows suit. It looks like the worst kind of tailgating, but it’s actually the start of a “platoon.” The driver of the second car never sets foot to the gas pedal or the brake.

Platooning is the ultimate union of the car and highway in automated “smart” matrimony. It will cram as many as three times the present number of cars onto freeways and move them along quickly and safely.

Achieving this, however, may be 20 or 30 years away. Two cars in tandem going 55 m.p.h. is a far cry from fleets of platoons zipping along the edge of a crowded freeway, spitting out and picking up vehicles.

Yet, as primitive as the two-car platoon seems, the technology that makes it happen took John Davis, chief scientist at a company named IVHS Technologies, 15 years to develop. He invented a radar system that allows one car to detect another vehicle (even in rain or fog), its speed, its distance, and to ignore all other road clutter such as signs and freeway overpasses. It does this by sending out signals 55,000 times a second. When the radar is linked by computer to the car’s brakes and throttle, platooning is possible.

IVHS Technologies is working with UC Berkeley’s PATH engineers to demonstrate a 15-car platoon. However, it also plans to market an offshoot of its radar platooning system--an audible collision warning device for cars--this summer. This will place the company among the first to commercially sell Mobility 2000-type technologies.

Platooning is a key element of IVHS, but it has one catch: “If we increase the flow (of cars),” Kanafani says, “we increase air pollution.

Enter the REPV--Roadway Electric Powered Vehicle. REPVs will be powered by batteries that are continually charged by cables built into the roadway. “It’s a very important technology,” says PATH’s Shladover as he opens a garage door near a test track at UC Berkeley. “If you have enough installed, you can travel unlimited distances on the freeway and still use batteries once you get to where you’re going.”

In the garage sits a bus, partly filled with enormous batteries. Shladover demonstrates how a metal plate drops to within three inches of the road surface to absorb energy from an electric cable buried under the roadway. Such cables generate a magnetic field on the road’s surface. The metal plate converts the magnetic force back into electricity, which moves the bus.

Right now, Shladover’s bus--bulky and pieced together--doesn’t look as though it will lead to sleek platoons whispering cleanly down the fast lane. But Shladover looks at the confusion of cables, computers and steel and sees the future: a commuter driving her electric car onto the freeway past a gatekeeper computer that checks for adequate fuel, good tire pressure and functioning on-board computers. The driver waits for a gap between platoons and moves into the fast lane, shifting from battery power to cable power and putting the car on autodrive. She programs her destination and settles back--the car automatically accelerates until it catches up to a platoon and later automatically exits the platoon and the fast lane--and returns to driver control.

Shladover acknowledges that the details of all this are still fuzzy, but he has faith. “I think eventually people will be able to read newspapers while making their car trips,” Shladover says. “Some of my colleagues say this is too radical, but I think these are achievable goals.”

“If we can work out automation, we can expect to enhance the volume of traffic by a factor of three, four or five,” Kanafani says. By contrast, traffic control will reduce congestion by only 10% to 15%, a gain that will be eaten up in California by the annual 5% growth of traffic.

But the ifs are many. The biggest one is the human factor. Can people really function as part of this system? Will they freak out moving at 90 m.p.h. with only three feet separating them from the car ahead? How will they manage all the information coming into the car to help them plot routes? And will they pay attention to any of the information that Traffic Central gives them?

“We are saying we don’t know,” Kanafani says, shrugging. “We are doing research to find out.”

What the planners already know is that automated travel will be much safer. According to Anthony Hitchcock, a systems safety expert working on the PATH project, most vehicular accidents today--more than 90%--are caused by human error. When accidents do happen in the future, they’ll resemble airliner crashes: “You’ll be “trading 100 accidents in which a total of 105 people get killed for two accidents in which 30 people get killed.” WILL MOBILITY 2000’S VIsions of the future really come to pass? The technological obstacles are massive, as are the cultural and legal pitfalls. Although political support is slowly growing, transportation planners still fight the government’s single-term mentality when it comes to making appropriations for systems that take 20 years to develop. That may change as IVHS gathers more steam. The defense industry, for example, is joining lobbying efforts as it sees uses for its smart weapons technology in IVHS systems.

Still, IVHS devotees say their project is all but a done deal. With transportation demand increasing at five times the rate of population growth, they say, there’s simply no other choice. “Will it happen before I retire? No,” says Vostrez, who is 54. “Before I die?” He smiles and nods. “Yes.”