Traffic Nerve Center’s Technology Not Quite in Fast Lane

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 Caltrans 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 office building in downtown Los Angeles 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 as quickly as possible.

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 problems 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 like Alex Reyman watch and wait and do what they can.

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.

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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 during 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 Styrofoam 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 they frequently did in the first hectic weeks following the Northridge Earthquake.

During catastrophic situations, the operations center becomes a virtual war room, coordinating the movements of an army of workers and engineers, as well as laying out quick plans to bypass broken freeways.

“We were up and running right after the earthquake,” said Joseph Brahm, the center’s senior transportation engineer.

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But 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.

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Dear Street Smart:

My question has to do with car-pool lanes. If you have four people in a vehicle and you are towing, say, a boat, are you allowed to drive in the car-pool lane?

Don Zshernig, Newbury Park

Dear Reader:

The short answer to your short question is no, you may not.

California Highway Patrol Officer Pablo Torres said if you are towing anything--whether a boat or a camping trailer or another car--you are restricted to the two right lanes of a five-lane freeway and the far-right lane of a three-lane freeway.

Since car-pool lanes generally run along the center divider, it would be illegal for a towing vehicle to merge left across other lanes to get there, regardless of how many people it is carrying.

Torres said that in cases where on-ramps dump cars into the left lanes of a freeway, the driver of a towing vehicle should quickly--but safely--merge right into the proper lanes.

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Dear Street Smart:

After the Northridge earthquake, at the intersection of Reseda Boulevard and Rinaldi Street, signals were re-timed so that traffic going east and west on Rinaldi had a longer interval between red lights.

Since the 118 Freeway has opened up, they haven’t readjusted the lights. Traffic coming out of Porter Ranch has to wait two to three light cycles to get through the Reseda-Rinaldi intersection because the light is so short for southbound cars on Reseda.

I was wondering if the city Department of Transportation would check into this to see why the signals haven’t been readjusted since the freeway reopening.

Mark Shapiro, Northridge

Dear Reader:

You’re absolutely right that the signals were adjusted after the quake to favor traffic on Rinaldi, which became a key detour for erstwhile freeway users. City traffic engineer Brian Gallagher says that not only was more time given to Rinaldi motorists between lights, but northbound Reseda drivers who wanted to turn west (left) onto Rinaldi also were given extra time for their green light, because so many motorists wanted to use Rinaldi as a bypass.

Southbound Reseda drivers were the sacrificial lambs. “All the time was taken away from them,” Gallagher says.

But that’s about to change. According to Gallagher, this week engineers are expected to readjust the signal at that intersection, restoring a longer cycle for southbound Reseda motorists.