Traffic Detoured as City Touts Its New Traffic Czar

Motorists looking for irony in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday didn’t have to drive far: Officials closed a block of Main Street at the end of a news conference by four elected officeholders, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to announce the hiring of a transportation chief to ease traffic congestion.

The mayor has said repeatedly that one of his major goals is to address the city’s often-wicked traffic. Accordingly, he announced at Thursday’s news conference his recruitment of Gloria Jeff as the new general manager of the city’s Transportation Department.

Jeff resigned earlier this month as director of the Michigan Department of Transportation to move to Los Angeles. She called Lansing, Mich., home in her last job and also has lived in Detroit and Atlanta, two cities known for bad traffic. Jeff, 53, begins her new job March 20.

“As you all know, traffic congestion is one of my key priorities,” the mayor said. “It is 11 o’clock, and we purposely had this press conference today at 11 o’clock because we wanted to demonstrate that in fact the traffic congestion in this city -- whether it’s 11 o’clock in the morning, 5 o’clock in the afternoon or 11 o’clock at night -- is affecting everything. Traffic is a major issue in this city, a major issue for me as mayor.”

The event was scheduled to be held at City Hall but was moved to the Main Street bridge over the 101 Freeway to provide better visuals for television cameras, according to a mayoral press deputy.

The lectern for the mayor and other city officials was placed in the street, a few feet from the curb. The change in venue also allowed several dozen members of the engineer and architects union to stand on the nearby sidewalk and to try to drown out Villaraigosa and the others by chanting “equal pay for equal work” as several members of the police watched them. The union has been campaigning for better pay for its city workers.

As the news conference ended, white-gloved traffic officers closed Main Street and diverted northbound traffic onto an eastbound access road paralleling the freeway.

Mayoral press secretary Joe Ramallo blamed the 10-minute street closure on the demonstrators, who he said were “overflowing into the street” -- and not the city officials who were already in the street. He said officials closed it to protect public safety.

That allowed Councilman Tom LaBonge, a photography enthusiast, to corral most of the contingent behind the podium to the other side of the bridge for a five-minute photo session with Jeff. LaBonge was joined by Villaraigosa and council colleague Wendy Greuel.

As for fixing traffic in the city, Villaraigosa and Jeff offered few details. Villaraigosa reiterated his desire to build a subway to the ocean and a downtown connecting line for the area’s light-rail routes and to continue synchronizing traffic lights.

Jeff said that she intended to pursue more mass transit, study traffic patterns on key travel corridors and work with businesses to find ways to better move freight around the region without snarling rush-hour traffic.

“The concept of eliminating traffic is not my priority,” she said in an interview. “My job is to manage it.”

Jeff emphasized that she would not ask people to give up driving. Rather, she hopes to improve mass transit so it serves more people and is convenient enough to reduce some car trips.

Her tenure in Michigan received mix reviews. The Detroit Free Press recently editorialized that the “state has lost a straight -- sometimes blunt -- speaking professional who always put policy above politics.”

Michigan state Sen. Jud Gilbert, chairman of the Senate’s transportation committee, said in a telephone interview, “I think she was very knowledgeable about the issues ... but I think the general view of the Legislature is that she didn’t work well with them.”

Gilbert said he didn’t see much change in Michigan’s transportation infrastructure during Jeff’s tenure, but blamed much of the lack of progress on the state’s finances.

He also recalled that Jeff was “quite an advocate for [mass] transit, but there’s really not a lot of support for that in Michigan. I can’t think of a good transit system that we have.”

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation oversees nearly all of the traffic signals in the city as well as the short-haul DASH and regional Commuter Express bus systems.