We’re All for Mass Transit -- in Theory

On the morning after Labor Day, the southbound 5 is backed up just north of Dodger Stadium and the northbound 101 is stalled near the Rog Mahal, where a few stressed-out motorists may have paused to pray for an early death.

I get to the office and go digging for a report from the Public Policy Institute of California.

There it is; here’s what it says:

“Two in three [California] residents (67%) prefer to focus on making more efficient use of freeways and highways and expanding mass transit instead of building new freeways (30%).”

This has to be a mistake, at least on the mass-transit issue. The report also claims 68% would vote for a sales tax hike to pay for more roads and -- I swear on my grandmother’s grave -- more public transit.

We drive in California, preferably alone. That’s what you and I do. And if we liked taxes, we wouldn’t have voted for the current governor, who expressed his feelings about a car tax increase by dropping a wrecking ball on an automobile.

I’m telling you the Public Policy Institute researchers were duped if they think two-thirds of the respondents would rather expand bus and train service than throw every last nickel into laying down more asphalt.

A new report by the Texas Transportation Institute crowns greater Los Angeles yet again as national champion for the amount of time we’re stuck in traffic.

This is not an achievement you luck into. You have to work at it, with year after year of bad planning, for one thing, and a collective commitment to avoid any personal sacrifice.

Traffic has actually taken a dip in these parts since 1992, which could be because of more highways. So why not build more?

The same Texas study sent a shout-out to San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which tied Dallas-Fort Worth for biggest increase in traffic nationally.

My promise to Dallas and Fort Worth is that they won’t be able to keep pace over the next 20 years. San Bernardino and Riverside will leave them in the dust in both traffic jams and smog, or as we like to call it here, “unhealthful air.”

How do I know this?

Because population growth was the whole point of the Public Policy Institute survey. We could go from the current 35 million to around 45 million by 2025, and no one in Sacramento is doing a thing to prepare the state for this expansion.

“For most people,” said survey director Mark Baldassare, “it seems to be that mass transit is part of the mix they’d like to see for the state’s future.”

Don’t believe it for a minute.

Sure, you might occasionally hear someone chatting up the merits of mass transit. But the first assumption is that someone else will use it, and the first requirement is that it pass through someone else’s neighborhood.

Take the Gold Line, long-awaited and much ballyhooed. Nobody rides it, and neighbors complain of the noise.

Take the Orange Line busway in the San Fernando Valley. It may never get built, thanks to neighborhood opposition.

Take the Wilshire Boulevard buses-only lane. It could get dumped because car traffic is slowed while bus passengers whisk by.

“It’s annoying,” a frustrated 21-year-old driver told The Times’ Caitlin Liu.

“You see an empty lane, you want to dart over there, but you can’t.”

Don’t just get rid of the bus lane, I say. Get rid of the buses.

And what’s with these bike riders clogging traffic?

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com