The Day L.A. Stood Still

I had a dream the other night that I was driving along the Ventura Freeway during the morning commute hour when I died and went to hell.

Well, actually, I didn’t go to hell; hell came to me. That’s the way nightmares are. Anything miserable is possible.

What happened in my dream was that a tanker truck carrying jet fuel and a semi loaded with nuclear warheads collided and burst into flame. Traffic in both directions came to an immediate halt.

At about the same time, a caravan of cars carrying mattresses tied to their roofs skidded on an oil slick and slammed into each other, scattering their cargo across the San Diego Freeway, both northbound and southbound.

So traffic on the San Diego came to a halt.

Similar incidents occurred on the Santa Monica, the Hollywood, the Pasadena, the Harbor, the Long Beach and the Golden State. It rained in some areas, causing mass collisions, floods and landslides. There was snow in the passes and fog along the ocean.

Those attempting to avoid the freeways by using what are known in L.A. as surface streets were faced with equal chaos. High winds caused power outages that deactivated the traffic lights and completed the city’s total gridlock.

Nothing moved. We sat in our cars like souls in cages, doomed to an eternity of never doing lunch again, never taking meetings and never making deals over cocktails at the Polo Lounge.

It was the day L.A. stood still.

*

I awoke from the nightmare realizing I had been granted an apocalyptic vision of the possible. It was rooted in a decision of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to dump plans for mass rail lines in L.A.

I see hell in the future, and the future is almost here.

What the MTA decision means is that maybe they will complete a subway to North Hollywood and maybe they will even eventually finish an above-ground rail line to Pasadena. But maybe they won’t.

Instead, more freeways will probably be added to the 725 miles already in use and more buses will be added to a fleet of 1,750 already belching their way around town, but efficient mass transit will remain a distant dream.

What began 20 years ago with voter approval of a sales tax increase to pay for a system of countywide trains is ending with a whimper. Plans for 300 miles of rail have only gotten as far as 48 miles.

It is not as though we had embarked on a project unheard of in the annals of transportation history. It is not as though an underground method of moving people had never been attempted before.

The Babylonians were digging tunnels 3,000 years ago. The Brits built the world’s first subway 125 years ago. But we try it and what happens? Streets collapse, chaos ensues and subway digging ends up costing $300 million a mile. We blame everything but El Nino for the disaster and dump the whole project.

History repeats itself. We started on a subway in 1925 too. Three years later it was one mile long. That’s as far as it ever got.

*

Cheering the demise of the subway, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the MTA board, shrugs and says we are an automotive culture and we’ve got to learn to work with that. Nothing’s going to change it “in our lifetime.”

That’s not new. Nothing has changed it in the last several lifetimes, so maybe it’s time to start planning for the next hundred lifetimes with a little more efficiency than we’ve managed to display in this lifetime.

Motor vehicles travel about 33 billion miles a year on all the roads and freeways in the county. The Federal Highway Administration calls L.A. the most congested city in the country, and it’s not going to get any better.

“We can’t impose a New York system on Los Angeles,” Yaroslavsky says to me. “Let’s work with what we’ve got.”

What we’ve got are the freeways, a scramble of vehicles that can turn any drive into an instant nightmare. Yaroslavsky wants more diamond lanes, more privately sponsored commuter vans and more ride-sharing incentives like free parking. He wants everyone to carpool one day a month forever.

But then he sighs and says the idea is probably a pipe dream and nothing is going to happen until it gets bad enough. Zev? Hello? It’s already bad enough. That’s why the voters OKd a sales-tax increase in 1980. It was bad enough back then. It’s bad enough now.

My nightmare continues. I am still trapped in my car, still in gridlock, but I see a light. Something glorious is coming to save us all. Then I see it is only the directors of the MTA wearing halos. What they lower is not a golden ladder, but plans on parchment for more buses at the end of eternity.

Promise and disappointment. It’s what hell is all about.

*

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com