Watch for Slowing Traffic

For years, transportation experts have said it is just a matter of time before traffic in Southern California comes to a complete standstill.

Predictions of a traffic cataclysm were temporarily postponed in the early 1990s when the recession forced us all to cut back on cross-town trips and vacation travel.

But the economy is now in high gear, and we are hitting the roads in big numbers again. Traffic congestion in Southern California is growing by about 3% a year, as measured by number of miles of clogged freeways, and is only expected to increase even faster as this region of 19 million absorbs a projected 7 million new residents in the next 20 years--the equivalent of twice the population of Chicago.

Still, commuters are slow to try ride-sharing. Subway tunneling is too expensive, and monorail trains running down the middle of our freeways are too controversial.

Let’s face it: Gridlock is again threatening to become a reality.

State officials concede that they will be hard-pressed to keep up with the increasing traffic, and transportation experts say it will take a huge investment in our freeways--the kind that voters are reluctant to support--to ward off worsening congestion.

“We feel like it’s a race against time,” said Tom Choe, who heads the California Department of Transportation’s traffic management office for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

How bad can it get?

The Southern California Assn. of Governments predicts that if population trends and transportation spending continue at their current pace, average rush-hour speeds will drop from about 35 mph to 15 mph in the region’s urban centers by 2010.

“It is getting worse, and it will get worse,” said Hasan Ikhrata, a transportation manager at SCAG, which represents Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties.

Eric Rose’s commute exemplifies the accommodations that some drivers have already made to cope with the worsening congestion.

The public relations executive’s drive from his Thousand Oaks home to his job in downtown Los Angeles used to take two hours each way. Rose became so annoyed by the slow traffic that he recently began leaving home at 5:45 a.m. and heading back about 6:30 p.m. in an effort to bypass the worst congestion during both legs of his journey. His 47-mile commute now takes an hour in each direction.

“I like the smooth ride into L.A.,” he said. “But it makes for a very long day.”

The biggest drawback, he said, is that he spends less time with his 4- and 2-year-old sons, getting home just in time to tuck them into bed.

Corey Olfert adjusted by taking a job closer to home. He got fed up with his hourlong commute from his Agoura Hills home to his job at a corporate communications firm in downtown Los Angeles. This month, he started a new job at a software company in Camarillo, only 19 miles from home. His commute now takes 20 minutes each way without traffic.

“The shorter commute was the first thing that caught my eye about the job,” he said.

Increased ridership on the region’s rail and bus systems is helping to delay impending disaster, but many transportation experts say it is not enough.

“The system is going to break down,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. “How far it can go and how long it can last is a big question mark.”

Rush Hour Starts Earlier, Ends Later

Anyone who has driven in Southern California already knows how bad freeway traffic has become during the last few decades.

There was a time when the rush hour was exactly that--an hour between 7 and 8 a.m. and another between 4 and 5 p.m. Today, Caltrans says, the peak traffic periods are from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 3 until 7 p.m.

Traffic reports--once 15-second spots relegated to the early morning and late afternoon--are now updated every six minutes on one news radio station and are offered around the clock on the Internet. One local TV station has even employed a mounted camera, called the “Jam Cam,” to let viewers see the traffic for themselves.

The Texas Transportation Institute ranked Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties as the nation’s most congested area for the 14th year in a row last year. The institute estimates that traffic delays cost the region $10.8 billion in productivity a year, representing 684 million lost work hours.

With the state Department of Motor Vehicles reporting more than 20 million licensed drivers in California, with slightly more than 5 million of those in Los Angeles County, it is no surprise that the county has the four busiest freeways in the state. Topping the list is Interstate 405, the San Diego Freeway, which carries 331,000 vehicles a day in the stretch south of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

Solving the region’s transportation problems will be a herculean task. Funding is scarce. The most congested urban areas are built to capacity, making it politically and financially difficult to build new freeways or rail lines. And there is little agreement about the best way to solve the problem.

The ideas run from the sublime (“smart corridors” that use synchronized traffic lights to move more vehicles through congested corridors) to the ridiculous (one- and two-passenger “micro cars” that would fail to meet federal safety standards and would be crushed like a tin can in a collision with an average sport-utility vehicle).

Other ideas include the construction of dedicated freeway lanes for big-rig trucks and deployment of high-speed bullet trains running from downtown Los Angeles to San Diego.

Scientists have tested a “smart highway” in San Diego that uses automated cars--equipped with on-board computers--that can travel 12 feet apart at 65 mph, increasing freeway capacity by up to 200%.

But how do we pay for these ideas, and how much is enough?

In March, state Sen. John Burton (D-San Francisco) introduced a $16-billion bond bill, the biggest in state history, to improve and expand the state’s freeway system and regional bus and rail lines. But even Burton acknowledges that the amount might not be enough to keep up with the growing traffic. In fact, a 1996 state study found that the cost to meet the state’s transportation needs for the first 20 years of the coming century will be about $122 billion.

Caltrans is investing in several congestion-busting programs, but its main focus is on carpool lanes and a high-tech traffic-monitoring system that is designed to increase freeway capacity by about a third.

The Answer Isn’t More Freeway Lanes

Still, department officials state candidly that their efforts might not be enough to keep up with the projected population growth.

Frank Quon, the operations chief for Caltrans in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, says people always ask him why the state doesn’t simply build more freeway lanes to accommodate the increasing traffic.

Caltrans has been adding lanes and extending freeways whenever land and money are available, he said. In some cases, new lanes are added by narrowing existing lanes and eliminating the shoulder area.

But in most cases, Quon said, new lanes simply attract motorists who had previously taken other routes.

“We will never be able to add enough capacity to meet the demand,” he said.

It is also expensive and politically problematic to pave over homes and businesses to build or expand freeways. Consider the community protests and lawsuits that have kept Caltrans and the U.S. Department of Transportation from completing the 6.2-mile Long Beach Freeway extension through South Pasadena and adjacent communities.

Most current freeway construction in Southern California is to make way for carpool lanes, which Caltrans believes are the best hope for reducing congestion--that is, given the impediments to adding capacity, the agency has chosen to focus on attacking traffic volume.

The state is in the process of doubling the number of high-occupancy-vehicle, or HOV, lanes from 305 miles to 680 miles in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties by 2015.

But the effort has drawn harsh criticism from commuters and some lawmakers who say HOV lanes are underused and take up desperately needed lanes that could otherwise be used by all motorists. They note that just 15% of Southern Californians share rides--a percentage that has remained virtually unchanged for years.

Creation of More Toll Lanes Is Debated

Caltrans officials argue that HOV lanes have prevented even worse congestion. They call the lanes a success because the percentage of motorists who carpool has remained steady while the number of drivers has increased.

SCAG traffic experts propose charging solo commuters a toll to drive on underused carpool lanes, turning them into high-occupancy toll, or HOT, lanes.

Caltrans is considering the idea for the Antelope Valley Freeway in northern Los Angeles County. But the agency is moving cautiously, worried that HOT lanes will create a separate and unequal system that allows the well-to-do to cruise to work while others get stuck in increasing traffic.

Poole, the transportation director at the Reason Institute, argues that America’s free-market system is based on paying higher rates for higher quality. Why not pay for a faster commute? he asks.

HOT lanes are considered a politically safer way to go than some of the other so-called congestion-pricing ideas under consideration, such as charging motorists a fee--say, 5 or 10 cents a mile--based on how far they drive during rush hour.

The idea behind congestion pricing is to force motorists to think twice about driving during peak periods.

Toll roads are another congestion-pricing idea that Caltrans has been studying, particularly in Orange County, which has more HOV lanes per mile of freeway than any other county in the state.

So far, however, the 51 miles of toll roads there have barely raised enough to make payments on the $3.1 billion in bonds that were used to build them. Once the 40-year bonds are paid off, the roads will become general-access freeways.

Response to the toll roads has been lukewarm, prompting the agencies that operate them to spend more than $1 million a year on advertising.

Still, proponents of toll roads say the idea provides another financing option to build new freeways.

“If we had waited for the money to be available, we would be waiting for a long time,” said Lisa Telles, a spokeswoman for the toll road agencies.

System Monitors and Manipulates Traffic

But toll roads are not an option in the most densely populated regions of Los Angeles County, where undeveloped land for new construction is unavailable.

For now, Caltrans is concentrating on getting the most out of the existing freeways by monitoring and manipulating traffic with closed-circuit cameras, pavement sensors and ramp meters installed throughout Southern California freeways.

The cameras and sensors allow traffic workers at Caltrans offices to identify trouble spots and warn motorists through freeway message signs and the Internet. They can also dispatch tow trucks to clear accidents and stalled vehicles.

In Los Angeles and Ventura counties, freeways are monitored from an $8.5-million traffic nerve center in downtown Los Angeles. A similar center in Irvine monitors freeway traffic in Orange County.

Caltrans’ Transportation Management Center in downtown Los Angeles resembles a NASA control room. Screens in the front of the room show traffic images captured by 120 cameras installed on top of 40-foot poles along the most congested freeways. One screen shows a freeway map of the entire region, with green lights indicating free-flowing traffic and blinking red lights indicating congestion. About 13,000 pavement sensors measure traffic flow on 615 miles of freeway.

Workers at computer terminals can click a mouse on a blinking red light on the freeway map and call up a live TV image of the congestion. The workers can then dispatch tow trucks to remove stalled vehicles when they are the cause of the backup. Studies have shown that for every minute a vehicle is stranded in a lane, there are at least four minutes of slowed traffic behind it.

If too many vehicles are entering a freeway, causing congestion, Caltrans workers can limit additional traffic by adjusting ramp meters.

Only about half of the region’s freeways are wired with cameras and sensors. If Caltrans officials can get the $5.2 billion needed to expand the system to all freeways in Southern California, it can increase freeway capacity by about 33%.

But then again, that extra capacity might be quickly swallowed up by all those new residents (that is, motorists) who are expected to move into the region.

Until Southern Californians muster the will to pay for the multibillion-dollar items on traffic planners’ wish lists, or quickly begin to change their driving habits, the countdown to gridlock will only continue ticking.

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Times staff writer Hugo Martin can be reached at hugo.martin@latimes.com.