From Electronic Nerve Center, Caltrans Combats Traffic Tie-Ups

Over just a few minutes, it happens--just as it happens five mornings a week 52 weeks a year.

At 7:45 a.m. the tiny lights embedded in the giant road map on the wall flicker green, then many change to yellow, then many more to red. In muted colors, the television monitors on the wall show a steady stream of cars moving mostly fast, then mostly slow, then not at all through Downtown’s four-level interchange.

Quietly and quickly, the morning rush hour has begun.

And while traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway crawls a few miles away, the workday is just starting to speed up inside the California Department of Transportation traffic operations facility--the electronic nerve center for Los Angeles County’s 527 miles of freeway.

It is here in a windowless room in a drab 1960s Downtown office building that the Big Brothers of the Open Road scan the freeways electronically for problems--stalled cars, wayward ladders or other road problems--and try to solve them.

What the cadre of traffic engineers and dispatchers can do now is fairly limited. They can dispatch crews or California Highway Patrol officers to scoop up debris or help clear accidents. They can flash messages on the lovable Freeway Condition signs, warn the media of nasty tie-ups and, in extreme situations, change the sequence of on-ramp meter lights.

All of this helps move traffic along, but it is not exactly an Orwellian Ministry of Traffic.

Eventually, the Caltrans folks say, they will be able to solve many of the freeways’ everyday headaches without ever leaving the room. In time, new computers and new equipment will allow them to coordinate signals on city streets with freeway traffic and thus manipulate real cars just like toys with a few double-clicks of a computer mouse.

For now, though, workers such as Alex Reyman watch and wait and do what they can.

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From his desk, Reyman can watch images transmitted via microwave by 18 video cameras installed along the freeways. Intended to show the current condition of certain freeway stretches, the cameras can be rotated or zoomed in to get a clearer picture of a problem area.

Reyman said the images are not clear enough to catch unwitting motorists in subtle but embarrassing situations, such as being face-first in a cheese danish or knuckle-deep in a nose scratch.

They are clear enough to catch more obvious events. “We see people bump into each other all the time, fender-benders,” said Reyman. “Sometimes we see people running across the freeway.”

Once a box of sombreros fell off a truck and was hit by a car as traffic engineers watched on their monitor. The engineers thought they had a “situation” on their hands until, as they watched, every last sombrero rolled unaided off the freeway.

Problem solved.

Bigger problems are not so easy. Traffic congestion has grown faster than traffic technology.

Last year, motorists drove about 81 million miles a day on the freeways and highways of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Eight of the 10 busiest freeway interchanges in the country are in Los Angeles. And the busiest--the East Los Angeles interchange--cycles through 570,000 vehicles a day.

Accommodating all this traffic is a freeway system that was designed in the 1950s and built over the 1960s and 1970s. The traffic operations center was built in 1971 to make the most efficient use of the freeways.

A giant map on the wall of the operations center displays Southern California’s freeways illuminated by hundreds of tiny lights. The map’s lights are connected to a computer, which in turn is fed by hundreds of sensors embedded every half-mile or so in the freeway--one for every light on the map.

As congestion around a sensor increases, the lights change from green, which indicates free-flowing traffic, to yellow, which indicates some slowing, to red, which indicates traffic as usual. In other words, practically stopped.

“Right around 8 a.m., most of it goes red,” Reyman said, his spotless desk occupied only by a half-filled plastic-foam coffee cup and a logbook filled with careful entries.

When it was dedicated by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, the giant map was state of the art, a twinkling testament to the region’s passion for making the freeways free-moving arteries of freedom and opportunity.

More advanced computers now sit on desktops in the center, churning out more detailed data and giving engineers a clearer picture of what the road ahead holds for commuters.

The map is mostly for show now--a funky prop that looks good when the occasional television news crew comes by to film, as occurred in the first hectic weeks after the Northridge earthquake.

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On a routine day the center runs along quietly. Radios carrying the conversations of CHP officers and Caltrans crews and tow truck drivers drone in the background. Computer cooling fans hum quietly.

Over the years, new equipment such as the video cameras have come on line. The Freeway Service Patrol tow truck fleet is monitored in one corner of the room by Julie Jefferson, a no-nonsense woman who keeps tabs on her 144 drivers via a computer screen. Computers also relay information from CHP officers in the field. And they update a cable television program that displays current road conditions--presumably for those with TVs at the wheel--called “Freeway Vision.”

But all of this seems almost antique when compared to the complexity of a new program being installed as part of a pilot project along the Santa Monica Freeway. The $50-million Smart Corridor program will allow engineers Downtown to manipulate road conditions and to relay information to drivers to reduce congestion.

“So much of your life in Los Angeles is spent in your car that any little change, even a minute, can get really annoying,” said Caltrans spokesman Russ Snyder.

So in the future, Big Brother will not only be watching. If the engineers can pull it off, he may also help out.