The Free Ride Won’t Last Much Longer

I walked around the empty Santa Monica Freeway at La Cienega Boulevard Monday afternoon, taking a quiet look at the reconstruction job before the superhighway returned to its usual jammed, polluted state.

Not that my relationship with this ugly concrete road has every been a sentimental one. The last time I’d approached that spot on foot was early in the morning, the day after the earthquake, just as the workers were arriving to begin the repair. I’ve never liked this freeway, which has been my route to work the last 24 years. But I wanted to pay my respects on the occasion of its remarkably speedy recovery.

Tuesday morning, of course, the truth came out. Times reporter Virginia Ellis disclosed that state engineers, racing for a record, permitted the bridges to be rebuilt with seismic weaknesses that will have to be corrected later. Reading that, I thought of what my father used to tell me when I started a new and difficult job--go slow and be careful. Failure to follow his advice resulted in my having to take high school chemistry two times.

Although Ellis’ story made me nervous, I took the freeway to work anyway.

I was alone in my car, just like hundreds of thousands of other commuters. I could see that most of us unreconstructed, car-loving Santa Monica Freeway users hadn’t learned much from our almost four months of fighting gridlocked city street intersections and stoplights. As Dan Garcia, former head of the Los Angeles Planning Commission, put it: “Beset by drought, fires, recessions, riots and now earthquakes, Southern California’s 15 million people labor under the unnecessary additional burden of a grossly inefficient and, even in normal times, an unbearably congested transportation network.”

This cannot continue, Garcia said. “Health-based air quality standards are here to stay, and since 65% of the area’s pollutants are from . . . cars and trucks, policies that will reduce the number of vehicles on the road are essential.”

By coincidence, at the exact moment the rebuilt freeway was being dedicated, the future of our overburdened transportation system was being discussed at a seminar at the Biltmore. Garcia’s comments, in fact, were part of a report presented at the meeting, which was sponsored by the Reason Foundation, a Libertarian-oriented think tank.

The meeting didn’t get the notice given to the dedication, but in the end it will be much more important to the history of transportation in Los Angeles than the ceremony on I-10’s newly laid concrete.

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Although the L.A.-based Reason Foundation is scorned by liberals as a bastion of conservatism, it had assembled a group of transportation experts representing a range of political views. One of the most important reports came from a tall, young, curly-haired economic analyst named Michael Cameron, who since 1989 has researched Southern California transportation for the Environmental Defense Fund. The defense fund is disliked by the right as much as the Reason Foundation is by the left. The fact that the two organizations were cooperating at this meeting was evidence of how widespread the concern over Southland traffic has become.

Cameron has figured out that one reason Angelenos stick to their cars is that the auto is the cheapest mode of transportation. I don’t exactly understand why. He uses mathematical formulas, and as I mentioned previously, I had to repeat high school chemistry.

He concluded that even considering car payments, gas, insurance and the rest, it’s comparatively cheap to drive your car, cheaper than using public transportation.

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Cameron’s answer is to make driving more expensive by levying a 5-cent-a-mile fee. It would be fair: The multi-vehicle, long-driving rich would pay more than the short-trip poor. Other speakers at the meeting had variations on the theme, proposing tolls for use of free-flowing diamond lanes during rush hour. Pay more and get there faster.

The money would be used to subsidize more attractive forms of public transportation. One day you’ll summon a Super Shuttle-type van on your home computer.

You may think this is all academic dreaming. But it’s not. Toll roads are becoming a reality in Orange County. In the San Francisco Bay Area, they’re talking about higher Bay Bridge tolls during the rush hours, a concept known as “congestion pricing.” In fact, Congress, as far back as 1990, ratified the idea of such pricing in the Clean Air Act.

This is the future. We freeloading commuters on the Santa Monica Freeway are history.