The Daily Breeze
Originally published Thursday, January 12, 2006
L.A.'s trapped in a monster traffic jam, and there's no exit in sight
Infatuation with the automobile means no one is wiling to make the effort to make region's transit system work.
By John Bogert
I was shocked to hear that area traffic got a fat F from the Southern California Association of Governments.
I was shocked that it wasn't lower, like Z for Zreadful. What's even more amazing is that the regional planning agency didn't come to this conclusion seven years ago when it started issuing letter grades to a public too stupid to understand anything else. I say stupid not as an insult to stupid people, like the ones who gave us "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo." I mean stupidly normal, like us. And by "us" I mean you and me and almost everyone except those people who are too smart or too poor to squander hours and fortunes in traffic that will never improve.
Face it, we're a big terminal case. But we keep on doing what we do because the transit system isn't easy or convenient. If you don't believe me, take the Pasadena Gold Line, to the Red, Blue and Green lines to Redondo Beach. Then try going from the Marine Avenue terminus to anywhere in under two city-bus hours. Our transit system has some wonderful, broad brush strokes, but it just doesn't work without an effort we are not willing to make, even with ruinous gas prices and the certain knowledge that the current way can't be sustained.
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Traffic light timing stinks. Parking stinks. What's worse, we stink because we can't figure a way out of this mess. In fact, all we can do is grow. In 2004, our six-county region added 284,000 people. That's 10 percent of the nation's total population growth, 53 percent of the state's total growth.
USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate estimates that the Southern California population will increase by 6 million people over the next 20 to 25 years "due to a natural increase in births over deaths." Six million! Meanwhile, and this is strange considering how slow traffic moves, SCAG reports that regional highway fatalities increased by 8 percent from 2000 to 2004 while decreasing everywhere else in the nation.
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Of course, many more cargo containers could move through the massively expensive Alameda Corridor. Only they don't. In fact, the 20-mile, $2.5 billion rail line designed to take seagoing containers off the roads operates at less-than-half capacity. Why? Well, it's because other distribution systems were put in place during the 18 years it took to build the passage. That, and trucking companies don't want to pay a $15 corridor fee.
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