Transit Planners Look Into Contrasting Futures

Two dramatically differing versions of Southern California’s transportation future intersected Thursday, one as bleak as rush hour traffic, the other a dream in progress to link Northern and Southern California with high-speed rail.

The sweeping plans envision projects as disparate as carving a new freeway through the shrinking Orange County wilderness and high-speed trains whisking commuters from San Francisco to San Diego as fast as 200 mph.

Whether any of the more imaginative ideas will ever come to fruition remains to be seen.

The two plans--one by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which painted a dismal version of the future, the other by the California High-Speed Rail Authority, were a mix of hard realities and wistful dreams.

Because both developments involve planning documents, they are subject to significant revision, if not rejection, at some point.

Politically, many of the proposals made in the plans may be difficult to pull off.

The association of governments, which makes planning decisions for six counties in the Los Angeles region, said in its new 25-year transportation plan that the region will be $10 billion short of what it needs to maintain its present transportation system and $40 billion beneath what is required to make improvements needed to keep pace with projected population growth.

The plan released Thursday by the association of governments paints a picture of a vast region unable to keep pace with rapid growth in population and jobs.

“The future transportation system is expected to be overwhelmed by new demand,” the plan says.

As a result, there will be worsening congestion, with commuters moving at much slower speeds.

The plan anticipates many tax increases to help pay for maintenance of the existing system and to finance improvements.

The planners said it is crucial for voters in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to renew sales tax increases approved decades ago. Special transit taxes in the three counties are scheduled to expire over the next 10 years.

Los Angeles County has a similar transit tax, but it is self renewing, with no expiration date. Ventura County does not have a special transportation tax, but it will be coming under pressure to add one.

Transit advocates clearly face an uphill battle in getting the taxes renewed. A simple majority of those casting ballots was all that was needed when they were approved. But tax measures now require two-thirds approval by voters because of anti-tax measures and legal opinions since then.

The plan also calls for increases in gasoline taxes and levies on alternative vehicle fuels, such as natural gas.

As for the high-speed rail proposal, the proposed 700-mile rail line could cost $25 billion to $33 billion, according to estimates.

Still in its early stages, sponsors of the plan say money could be raised with taxes, borrowing or some kind of pay-as-you-go system.

On Thursday, the seven-member rail authority hired a planning agency to do an environmental impact study of its proposed Los Angeles-to-San Diego link through the Inland Empire.

The route would run east-west from Los Angeles’ Union Station through the east San Gabriel Valley to Ontario Airport and Riverside, then turn south, generally following the route of Interstate 15 and 215, through Temecula, Escondido and Mira Mesa to San Diego.

A second proposed route that would go through Orange County emerged as a possibility Thursday when the rail authority decided to go forward with an environmental study of a possible line running along the coast, following the existing rail line used by Amtrak’s San Diegan train.

The plan for the line through Orange County envisions stops in Norwalk, Anaheim, Irvine and Oceanside before trains head to San Diego.

The problem faced by the High-Speed Rail Authority is that it is being kept on an extremely short leash by Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature.

The authority has $5 million to get it through the year, but will have to return to the Legislature for more funding to continue its progress toward development of a complete plan. The authority had asked for $25 million to complete its environmental reviews, but was turned down by the political powers in Sacramento.

One problem is that most of the voting members on the authority’s board were appointed by former Gov. Pete Wilson. A clearer picture of just how seriously the board is being taken will come when Davis begins replacing five Wilson appointees after the first of the year.

“Not everybody is in favor of high-speed rail,” said Commissioner Jerry Epstein at Thursday’s meeting, which was held in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board room. “We have a lot of critics out there.”

The debates and discussions of the plans follow a time-honored ritual of government, right down to scare tactics.

Highways and rail lines don’t get built without first being included in plans, sometimes for years. Often, projects don’t get built even if they are included in plans, because regional agencies are only part of an array of decision-making agencies that includes cities, counties and the state and federal governments.

By coincidence, the Automobile Assn. of Southern California, one of Southern California’s oldest car culture institutions, was celebrating its 100th anniversary Thursday with a daylong transportation symposium at USC.

Lest anyone forget the benighted history of some past transportation plans, Martin Wachs, director of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Transportation, reminded academics and policy wonks at the AAA seminar that an extension of the Long Beach Freeway into Pasadena was first put into a regional plan in 1949.

Furious community opposition in South Pasadena and Pasadena has kept the freeway from being completed. Nevertheless, the association of governments has included the missing freeway link in its new transportation plan.

Wachs also recalled that when the first transportation plan surfaced in Los Angeles in 1924, it was accompanied by all sorts of gloom and doom over an escalating traffic congestion problem that many said was growing out of control. As early as 1920, Los Angeles already had one car per household.

The population of Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties is projected to increase by 40%, to 22.6 million by 2025, an increase of more than 6 million residents in a quarter-century, according to the document. The number of jobs is expected to grow even faster.

All of these new residents will create intense demand for more housing and will inevitably lead to further sprawl, the plan said.

While they foresee a doubling in the number of miles of carpool lanes and construction of more commuter and light rail lines, planners say the region’s transportation facilities “will not keep pace with the expected 40% population growth.”

The consequence of this growth will cause more pain for commuters, who will see freeway traffic slow to an average 16 mph or less during peak periods, the planners wrote.

The worst traffic congestion and slowest speeds are forecast for the densely populated areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties and on the routes that connect those job-rich areas with outlying areas where housing is less expensive.

One solution to congestion problems in Orange County, the planners said, was building a freeway to Riverside County through the Cleveland National Forest. That would take pressure off the Riverside Freeway, which experiences heavy congestion of commuters from Riverside County going to and from jobs in Orange County. But the proposal would surely trigger a fight between highway advocates and environmental activists.

The draft regional transportation plan leaves unanswered for now a major question: how to handle the region’s anticipated doubling in demand for air travel--from 80 million passengers a year today to 164 million in 2025.

Three of the four scenarios being considered by the regional agency call for a major airport at El Toro in Orange County. It would be capable of handling as many as 30 million passengers annually by 2025.

“If this region is to be competitive in a global economy, the piece of infrastructure it needs is airports,” said Mark Pisano, the association of governments’ executive director. He repeated his position that there needs to be a fair-share distribution of airport capacity within the region.

But use of El Toro for a major commercial airport is a hotly contested issue in southern Orange County. Farther north, plans for a huge expansion of Los Angeles International Airport are generating controversy in areas heavily affected by aircraft.

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Road to the Future

A transportation proposal for Southern California released Thursday predicts that rapid growth in population and jobs over the next 25 years will lead to worsening gridlock and traffic congestion even with a massive investment in transit improvements. The region is made up of Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties. The California High-Speed Rail Authority voted Thursday to formally study a second possible rail line from Los Angeles to San Diego through coastal Orange County.

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The plan calls for doubling the number of miles of carpool lanes, including direct carpool lane connectors between freeways at major interchanges in Los Angeles and Orange counties, such as the San Diego and Costa Mesa freeways, at left.

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Note: 1997 figures are actual; figures for other years are estimated.

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Sources: Southern California Assn. of Governments; California High-Speed Rail Authority