SPECIAL REPORT * Using traffic sensors, strategically placed video cameras and a new nerve center, Caltrans and CHP try to keep . . .

On one wall of the fortress-like freeway nerve center in downtown Los Angeles are half a dozen video monitors that display much of the worst of any given day’s freeway traffic in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

At least 1 million cars, trucks, buses and vans move in and out of Los Angeles County every day, flowing in from Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties onto the L.A. area’s network of 27 freeways.

For the dozens of Caltrans and CHP techies whose eyes are trained at the wall monitors or the desktop computers in front of them, it is just another day in the traffic hell war room. The monitors stay on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so there is a never-ending silent procession of people tailgating, lane jumping, expressing their rage, or just plain stuck in traffic.

From early morning darkness, when the inbound commute to central Los Angeles is marked by an endless stream of white headlights, to nightfall, when the outbound commute turns into a stream of red taillights to the mountains, deserts and far-flung suburbs, the men and women who staff the high-tech center will do little more than fret over traffic snarls and move CHP units, tow trucks, ambulances and Caltrans trucks around like so many pieces on an electronic game board.

The 63 government workers who staff the center during the day and night work in a large, open 13,430-square-foot room. Their job is to keep the traffic moving on the 615 freeway miles in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where each day motorists put 97 million miles on their odometers. Most dress casually, and some arrive carrying lunch boxes. Taking up their positions behind some of the 25 computer workstations lined up in rows in front of the video screens, they work facing the wall of monitors, which is dominated by an oversized electronic map fed by thousands of sensors embedded in local freeways.

The sensors translate car speeds into green, yellow and red dots on the map, and are placed so tightly together that the outlines of the San Diego, Golden State, Santa Monica, Foothill, Pomona and Hollywood Freeways resemble long strands of colored DNA. Economists will tell you that the comparison to DNA is appropriate, for the freeways are considered vital in maintaining the economic lifeblood of the Southern California region. That fact is not lost on the traffic engineers, who approach their work of keeping the traffic moving with almost religious fervor.

The high-tech equipment, silent computers and tight security give the room the air of a top secret government project. But the intent is just the opposite: The idea is to get the word about traffic conditions out to the public as quickly as possible. By staying on top of the traffic situation, the operations center, working in tandem with the CHP’s Los Angeles Communications Center, also serves as a launching platform for a fleet of as many as 150 government-funded tow trucks that prowl the freeways every day responding to calls for help, cleaning up accidents and spills, and repairing an occasional blown radiator hose.

A monthly log of the CHP’s Computer Aided Dispatch System for Los Angeles County would show something like this: 104,000 traffic incidents of all types, nearly 20,000 traffic accidents, nearly 13,000 reported traffic hazards in roadways, 12,000 cases of tow truck service to disabled motorists, 10,170 vehicle breakdowns, 2,200 enforcement stops, and an average of four SigAlerts a day.

So it was that on the recent morning when a big-rig driver lost it while taking the Ditman Avenue exit on the southbound Santa Ana Freeway too fast, Tony Avila, a 25-year-old Caltrans traffic management specialist, didn’t even have to move from his workstation to get on top of the situation.

And media savvy California Highway Patrol Officer Frank Sandoval, by far the best-dressed person in the room, slid the item right into one of his periodic morning broadcasts as fluidly as any television anchorman.

With Southern California’s population steadily increasing, and no new freeways being built, Avila and Sandoval are at ground zero in the state’s fight to keep traffic flowing by moving from the paving of new lanes to computer technology and real-time video feeds to get smarter.

It works like this: Every 30 seconds, thousands of sensors embedded in local freeways send electronic impulses to a bank of Caltrans computers located in a climate-controlled room at the command center. The information is digested and turned into messages aimed at helping motorists in the form of SigAlerts, radio traffic reports and the warnings that pop up on changeable freeway signs.

Take the big rig that went out of control on the Ditman Avenue offramp at 5:50 a.m. one recent morning. Before coming to a stop, the truck knocked out a guardrail, power pole and parts of two houses.

With the accident just a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, and on the main interstate highway link between Northern and Southern California, traffic began backing up almost immediately.

With the Ditman offramp closed, the CHP, which operates the Spring Street command center with Caltrans, issued a SigAlert.

Avila immediately knew there was trouble by the cluster of red lights flashing on the electronic map that dominates the room--known officially as the Transportation Management Center.

Loops embedded in freeways send back electronic signals that get translated into lights along the freeway grid: red for speeds of 20 mph or less, yellow for speeds from 20 mph to 35 mph, and green for traffic 35 mph or faster.

Using his desktop computer, Avila tunes in and is able to monitor the arrival of ambulances, the CHP and fire units at the big-rig accident scene.

Begun in 1971, the center is a blend of older and newer computer technology. The original operations center was opened by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan amid much fanfare. Hailed then as the most sophisticated system of its kind in the world, the traffic grid resembled a home hobbyist’s railroad layout: a flat plywood board with hand-painted lines designating freeways.

With the new system, which in some ways resembles a real-world, real-time computer game, Avila can sit at his desk and jump visually from freeway to freeway, zooming at street level with a video camera or soaring above, as though flying over the basin at night in a plane, the landscape below lit up like an animated Thomas Bros. map.

Avila loves the upgrade in technology. “It’s exciting,” he said, expressing the delight his eyes showed as he worked his desktop computer. The new system, he said, “is amazing, simply amazing.” One dazzling upgrade: small icons of ambulances, firetrucks and CHP cars that show up on a computer screen as they arrive at an accident scene.

The main tool Avila uses is the electronic map.

With his fingers tapping instructions to the computer, Avila can zoom in on small icons dotting the freeway grid at strategic locations. The icons are functional, representing real-life likenesses of television cameras and freeway signs that are set up along freeways.

Steering Drivers Away From Trouble Spots

Pointing his cursor to the television camera icon near Ditman Avenue, Avila is suddenly looking at a real-time video of the traffic at Ditman. Only three years out of Cal Poly Pomona, Avila is a former math whiz from Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, so he knows the area. Using the directional arrows on the monitor, he can move the camera to see the traffic situation in both directions. He can leave that camera and go to one mounted on a pole at 4th Street or another on Vignes Street.

With the cameras all telling the same story, Avila decides to warn drivers away from the scene. To do this, he points the cursor at an icon resembling a sign, clicks and up pops a message screen tied to a movable sign at Broadway on the southbound Santa Ana Freeway. He types in, “South 5 Jammed at Ditman,” and instantly motorists who can see the sign know they face problems ahead.

A few feet away, CHP Officer Sandoval, 32, mentally adds the accident to the live feeds he does every few minutes for local radio and television stations. First up is a traffic update that the bilingual Sandoval delivers for the Spanish-language station KMEX-TV Channel 34. The flashing screen and video monitors make a nice background for the feed.

Sandoval moves from a radio report to a live television feed and back with the ease of a veteran newsman. He spent 7 1/2 years on patrol in Santa Fe Springs and Culver City before he joined the public information unit. When he isn’t doing traffic reports, Sandoval speaks at schools or talks to civic groups about the dangers of drinking and driving.

Television broadcasting, he said, “was nothing we were trained in.”

“We do it strictly as a public service,” he said.

Sandoval and Avila finish their work on the Ditman accident in a matter of minutes. Then their attention turns to other accidents and SigAlerts.

Flanking the 25 computer workstations at the center of the room where Avila and Sandoval work are telephone dispatchers who are in constant communication with Caltrans and private tow trucks that cruise all day along freeways.

One group of dispatchers sends out Caltrans crews to clean up problems that develop, like diesel spills or trash on the roadway.

On the opposite side of the room, another group of dispatchers connects with the taxpayer-supported Freeway Service Patrol, which can put 150 trucks out on the freeways at peak times to help disabled motorists by taping up a burst radiator hose, giving them a gallon of gasoline or fixing a flat, all for free. When dispatchers touch one of a dozen or so squares on their computer monitors, a phone rings in the truck they are trying to reach.

So far, a small army of techies has wired up many of the 615 freeway miles in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Ventura County is electronically tied into the Los Angeles nerve center as far west as Moorpark on the Simi Valley Freeway and Camarillo on the Ventura Freeway. Ventura County and outer reaches of the San Fernando Valley do not have television cameras.

Even now, Caltrans is upgrading the system by laying down fiber-optic cable on freeways. An additional 300 television cameras will be installed, adding to the 140 operating at strategic locations in Los Angeles County.

One day in the not too distant future, motorists may be able to access the same real-time television pictures available to Avila and Sandoval by hand-held or dashboard computers, experts say. Private companies are lining up to bid for the rights to the state’s television pictures.

Caltrans figures that about half of the local traffic congestion--the worst in the United States for 15 consecutive years--is due to the hundreds of crashes and breakdowns that occur each day on local freeways.

So the game plan is simple: Use computer technology and rapid response to keep the system moving.

Of course, if you are out there in the mess, inching along on the San Diego, Santa Ana or Long Beach freeways, you might not recognize the work being done.

But Frank L. Quon, Caltrans chief of the freeway traffic nerve center, suggests things would be a lot worse without the state’s high-tech operations center.

“If we didn’t do a thing, your commute times probably would have doubled in the last 10 years,” Quon said. “We have had this congestion for a long time, and we’ve made great strides to keep commute times relatively static. You are seeing a slow creep in your commute time, rather than big leaps and bounds.”