Cities, Business Offer Ideas for Easing Gridlock

In an innovative experiment to unclog sluggish streets and freeways, Los Angeles County transportation officials are exploring a number of new ideas ranging from building houses on top of a trolley station to offering child care at a commuter-train stop.

Two-year trials for 43 of these ideas--in communities from Watts to Westwood to West Hills--could begin within six months if the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission votes today as expected to allocate $15 million in federal grants meant to foster new approaches for relieving congestion.

Transportation officials said they have secured commitments from cities and corporations to more than match the federal funds.

The common thread in the programs, which also include a variety of new shuttles that are designed to make it easier for working people without cars to run errands, is a desire to challenge the common belief that life in Los Angeles requires an automobile.

“We’re really breaking new ground . . .” said Sarah Siwek, the commission’s director of transportation demand management. “Some of these things have been tried elsewhere, but a lot of them are new. And they’ve never been tried on the scale being planned here.”

As many as 50,000 automobile trips each workday--or roughly 13 million a year--could be saved by the projects being proposed, Siwek said. Actual savings would probably be less, particularly at first, because not all projects will work as planned and most will take a while for commuters to embrace.

One of the most expensive projects seeking funding would link the Transportation Commission with the city of Pasadena and the Janss Corp. on a project called Civic Center West, a development with 335 apartments and condominiums and 100,000 square feet of offices and shops to be built in western Pasadena.

Under the plan, it would become the first development in the county designed to promote the use of mass transit.

The commission is considering whether to spend $1.6 million to offset some of the costs of adding a trolley station beneath the building. Easy access to the trolley line--a Blue Line-style service that is scheduled to run between Pasadena and Union Station in Los Angeles as soon as 1996--is expected to make commuting by train too convenient to pass up, Siwek said.

Convenience is a primary element in most of the proposals. For example, surveys show that many people say they drive alone to work primarily because they have to drop off or pick up their children at day-care centers at specific times.

One proposed project would establish a child-care center at the Chatsworth station of the Metrolink commuter-rail line that is scheduled to begin operating Oct. 26. Parents could leave their car at the park-and-ride lot, walk their children to school and board a train for downtown--all at the same location.

Another project would start a child-care center near the Torrance Civic Center and Del Amo Fashion Center mall, giving enrollment preference to children whose parents car-pooled or took buses to jobs in the area.

Two proposed projects--in Pomona and Rancho Palos Verdes--would eliminate the need to drive to work by providing temporary satellite offices equipped with computers, faxes and phones. These “telecommuting” sites get office workers out of their homes and away from distractions, but let them catch up on paperwork without having to drive 20 miles or more to a conventional office.

The most massive project, costing $2.1 million in federal money and $1.3 million in local funds, involves buying 100 vans to establish a van pool service for the 50,000 people who work at Los Angeles International Airport.

Glendale is proposed as the host of a pair of projects designed to determine whether the promise of cash can lure commuters out of their cars and into car pools or buses.

In one project, participating companies would give their employees monthly “transportation stipends.” Employees could use them any way they wish--knowing that the cost of operating and parking a car would eat up most of the money, but that a bus pass would leave them plenty of cash.

Another project would issue parking debit cards to commuters. Each time they parked a car, a certain fee would be deducted from the total on the card. If they parked every day, all of the money would be gone at the end of each month; if they car-pooled or took the bus, they could cash in the unused portion.

Most projects were designed by individual cities to suit their needs, Siwek said, and were not conceived by the county Transportation Commission.

“They know the business community in their city better than we do,” she said. “They know the congestion problem firsthand; they know the parking problem firsthand. What works in Glendale might not work in, say, Long Beach . . . . It’s very difficult to do this in a one-size-fits-all approach throughout the county.”