Honk If You Hate Traffic: These Readers Lay on the Horn
Last Sunday, Opinion ran a bunch of brave, occasionally foolhardy ideas to clean up L.A.’s traffic mess. Readers gave us a spanking and kicked in some ideas of their own. We published some in the paper this week, and we’re reprinting them here, along with others we didn’t have space for. Are they sublime or absurd, right-on or wrong-way? You decide. Letters have been edited for readability and clarity.
Give It Away Free
The “experts” The Times enlisted for ideas on significantly reducing present and future road traffic omitted the simplest idea possible, namely make all urban mass transit free. This would quickly reduce the volume of cars on streets and freeways by at least 10%. The economic and health savings because of major reductions in commuting times and pollution should compensate for the less-than-half-percent increase in sales and business taxes needed to compensate for the lost fares.Who knows, if we can succeed on such a simple plan, a future Democratic Congress and president might adopt the approach nationwide and fund it by the federal government. This would dramatically reduce our nation’s “subsidy” to radical Arab oil interests and cut our annual expenses and angst on terrorism to boot.
Sid Turkish
Beverly Hills
Go in Circles
The single greatest disaster inflicted on L.A. surface streets is the use of the left-hand turn lane. This is a system that by design can never move more than about 40% of traffic, perhaps 10% to 20% on left arrows, at any moment in time. Traffic is concentrated in “platoons,” further aggravating congestion.The traffic circle system by design moves 100% of traffic 100% of the time. Three lanes and a left-turn lane would be more than equally served by two lanes and a three-lane traffic circle. The continuing expansion of this left-lane disaster and under-utilization of the traffic circle will undoubtedly be noted by future archeologists, as we note the odd absence of the wheel in Pre-Columbian American civilizations.
Clayton Dunn
Palos Verdes Estates
Pay the Toll
How about a different approach to the payment of tolls for use of the public transportation system. Let’s have both the employer and the employee pay a few-cents-per-mile toll each day for each mile over 10 that separates the home of the employee and the place of employment. That money would be used to improve streets and freeways, purchase buses and create a larger subway network. This toll would encourage creation of jobs near homes and homes near jobs. I am constantly amazed with the idea that just because someone finds a job and a home many miles apart, the general public is supposed to spend billions of dollars to improve/enlarge streets and freeways.
James T. Humberd
Burbank
Give Seniors a Free Ride
I have a suggestion to do something about traffic now, free of charge — for seniors, that is! Letting seniors ride the entire public transportation system totally free of charge may mean fewer cars used to go shopping, to see a ballgame, to see the family, wouldn’t it? And no ID card or any other card would be needed either. It would work on the honor system.
I just came back from a very busy big capital city, Budapest, where I could happily travel all over the place free as a bird on buses, streetcars, trolleys and subways. It would cost the city no capital investment at all outside of providing extra buses, which has been legislated already. Obviously this senior paradise idea would be a first step on the long journey to mitigate this festering conundrum.
George Kemenes
Los Angeles
Focus-Group It
Every major city in the world has to contend with traffic. Of the various programs in Opinion, none addresses the hours of work nor the method by which each traveler enters the grid.A mandatory questionnaire answering this question would be sent to every citizen within 50 miles of the city center.
After analyzing the data, schedules could be put in place to regulate 1) truck delivery and pickup and 2) staggering hours. And to assure more active use of the diamond lanes, a tax benefit to those obtaining a special decal.
Mel Brilliant
Laguna Woods
Make Tracks on the Freeway
L.A. is not too dispersed for a rail system to take most people where they want to go. The answer is to put a train down the center of all the freeways. Right now the trains are set up so that you have to go through downtown to get anywhere interesting. Who wants to spend hours going to downtown to get to West L.A. or the Valley?Also, they almost had the Green Line go to the airport where it would have been extremely useful but then changed their mind and decided instead to put a bus connection from the Green Line to the airport. Who is going to wait for a bus next to a nudie bar in the middle of the night? Come on, L.A., if San Francisco can have a train going right to the airport, we can too!
Steve Stillman
Redondo Beach
Take a One-Way Turn
Preposterous solutions to L.A.’s traffic woes presented by several Opinion columnists beg the question why the “experts” refuse to entertain the most obvious alternative: better traffic engineering, with more one-way streets. Each writer’s ridiculous remedy is easily refuted. Pointing to Singapore, one proposal is for a special fee for motorists in the central business district, forcing motorists to subsidize gridlock, as the problem is the clogged routes to downtown, not downtown itself. Another proposal, to pay workers for not parking near work, would make sense if there were direct public transit to get to work. But L.A. is not Manhattan; workplaces are scattered all over the city. A third idea is to allow competing bus companies and jitneys, none of which are likely to be profitable.Instead of armchair solutions, imagine an L.A. where travel is one-way along Olympic from downtown to the beach and one-way the other direction on Pico or Wilshire. Imagine Western Avenue from Hollywood to South L.A. as a one-way street, paired with Vermont going the other way. No delays for left or right turners, just synchronized lights and rapid travel. Downtown one-way streets can be extended in all four directions, and other pairings (Franklin-Hollywood, Sunset-Santa Monica, Wilton Place-Van Ness, Cahuenga-Vine, Highland-La Brea, Crescent Heights-Fairfax, La Cienega-Robertson, etc.) would invite motorists to get off crowded freeways while helping buses to attract more commuters.
Michael Haas
Los Angeles
Make major streets one way. Make all such major streets “no parking” from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Greatly restrict right and left turns from those major streets. The traffic backs up on all those heavily traveled streets minutes after 9 a.m. when parking is allowed. Why so badly jam-up traffic for so few people to park? These simple and cheap measures would pick up several extra lanes. Then better coordinate the signals so that traffic flows more freely. All of this could be done within weeks, not the many years to build rail lines.
Richard S. LeVine
Los Angeles
Live Where You Work
Re “A Cool Way To Unclog L.A.”: Mr. Fulton hinted at the solution: move people and their work closer together. That’s what New York City, the model mass transportation city, is finally doing: building buildings with shopping on the ground floor, businesses on the second or more floors, and living units on all the upper floors. Creating living units in Downtown L.A. is a start. Ken Jewett
Playa del Rey
Ride Your Bike
Portland and Eugene, Ore., have significant numbers of bicycle commuters without benefit of the mild weather Southern Californians enjoy. In many areas of L.A., it is far easier and faster to ride a bicycle than to drive a vehicle. Not only do you gain valuable exercise, you remove one more vehicle from the road. As a dedicated bicyclist I am always amused that my 215-pound body is readily transported at speeds up to 24 mph on a 32-pound city bike, yet when I look over the sea of oversized Hummers, SUVs and pickup trucks piled up at intersections I usually notice a single driver, weighing 150 pounds, driving 6,000 pounds of metal. As Thoreau said, “simplify.”
David Hill
Murrieta
One obvious antidote to gridlock was overlooked: a network of safe bike lanes.
I get to work by bike and love doing it, but my commute is along unusually quiet, safe streets, and my employer provides staff showers. Many people opt against commuting by bike not because the distances are too long, but because our streets are not designed to accommodate cyclists, which makes biking dangerous. At a minimum, safe bike lanes are well marked, at least five feet wide, and protected by vigorous parking enforcement.
Traffic congestion already is so bad that even some fairly long commutes are now faster by bike. If we had a larger network of safe bike lanes, thousands of commuters would ditch their cars and get their cardiovascular exercise on the way to work (instead of in a costly gym). That cuts congestion, fossil fuel consumption, smog and global warming emissions.
If wet, cold cities such as London and Amsterdam can lure legions of commuters onto bikes, so can sunny L.A.
Daniel S. Hinerfeld
Director of Communications
Natural Resources Defense Council
Santa Monica
Go-Go With Golf Carts
In the articles “A Cool Way to Unclog L.A.” and “Derail Trains and Ding Drivers,” both authors miss the main point as to why non-car transportation has low ridership.Ask people how close they work to the train station. I am sure most will tell you that the place they work is quite a large distance from where they get off the train.
The solution to the problem is to provide a means of transportation for the passenger from the train depot to their place of work. This could be accomplished very easily and at low cost by providing a small golf cart, protected for weather, at each station.
People would have a prepaid card that would allow them to rent a cart, drive to work and then return the cart at the end of the day to the station. When they arrived at their home station, they again could rent a cart, drive to their home and return the cart to the station in the morning and go to work.
Joel Zneimer
Pasadena
Stop Subsidizing Trucks
I rarely see any mention of the impact of trucks on the traffic problems in Los Angeles and everywhere else. I don’t commute any more but I do use the major freeways and highways in the area. Just as they were when I was commuting, trucks are a major cause of congestion.
One does not need to be an engineer to understand the impact of trucks on pavement as well as on the cost of maintenance. The engineers at Caltrans undoubtedly could quantify the amount of this impact if they were asked to do so by the right authority. By comparing these costs with the relative amounts of the income from the taxes on diesel and on gasoline, it would be clear if automobile users are subsidizing the trucking industry.
Richard Young
Claremont
Get on the Internet
Besides designing intelligent mass-transit systems and offering proper incentives to the public to use this mode of travel, restricting new industrial and residential developments near mass-transit routes, staggering work hours for employees, and using toll charges during peak hours, we can also move into the internet age to reduce traffic congestion.
A majority of our population is computer-literate and internet-savvy. Most of our businesses and government facilities use computers to carry out their functions and internet to transfer data between individuals and offices. It seems logical to consider moving the workplace from the office building to the worker’s residence and reduce if not eliminate the worker’s need to commute.
As a manager in high-tech industries, I personally proposed and worked out arrangements with some employees to enable them to work from their homes. While the employees may need to go to the office for special events, they can participate in meetings through teleconferencing and using their computer for displaying graphic data. Employers can set up a computer system and communication link at the worker’s residences at a relatively small cost and compensate the cost with savings in office and parking space.
Working from home requires a small change in the mind-set of employees and managers. Employees who work from home need to develop self-discipline. Managers need to depend more on carefully planned work schedules and frequent progress reports to ensure productivity. Tax incentives to industries that implement work-at-home programs for a minimum percentage of their work force may be needed to goad top management into changing their traditional mode of operation. With many industries already using overseas workers and internet communications to reduce their operating costs, it is just another step to use the same technology for work-at-home programs for local employees.
Maneck N. Bhujwala
Huntington Beach
Show Some Courage
Beep, beep, honk, honk. Seems to me the answer to every major problem, be it traffic, immigration, education, Social Security, is first: Courage. Know what you believe in. Do it.Eisenhower built our interstate highway system. California Gov. Pat Brown’s legacies are his good public works: the largest state water project in the nation, an expanded university system, 1,000 miles of new freeways. Can you imagine any of those projects being done today?
As you indicated, Mayor Hahn and a state senator came out for a grand strategy to widen the 101 freeway, only to back down when the NIMBYs checked in. If every mayor and governor and president did only what the public said they wanted, nothing of importance would be built or done. The public wants no taxes, no infringement on their territory, free drugs, free medical care, all potholes fixed at once, no blocked traffic, jobs for everybody, clean rivers and lakes, no crime.... Oh, I forgot. Add $1 gas.
Subway systems seem to work well in most large cities. After L.A. learned how to get rid of shoddy work and graft, we just stopped the project. No guts. Wouldn’t it be nice in 2030, when our population might have doubled, to be able to take a subway from Warner Center or Santa Monica to Union Station and make one transfer to LAX? Or get off anywhere along the way?
No matter what logical solutions are arrived at, it is going to take courageous, dedicated politicians to do the leading.
Herman Steinman
Calabasas
Get Hip to the Future of Transit
Your series of articles on congestion in L.A. is welcome — as a beginning. I hope you will broaden your inquiry to include a wide variety of concepts now being developed around the world that offer some possibilities not included so far. The Innovative Transportation Technologies website (faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/) includes descriptions of more than 85 working and emerging systems from around the world. Some are operational, some are under development and some are still conceptual. All are electric, environmentally benign, low cost, easy to construct and useful for intracity travel. Jerry Schneider Corvallis, Oregon
The writer is professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Take the Bus
Your articles on fixing the traffic problems are great! It is so refreshing to read opinions on how to fix things, not just opinions on what needs to be fixed. For seven weeks I was without a car and learned how easy it is to take the bus. Before each trip, I would go to mta.net and find the best route for that time of day. Except for weekends and evenings, I was surprised to find out that my time traveling was increased only about 10 or 15 minutes per the usual 20- to 30-minute trip.
I didn’t have to stress out about finding parking or stopping for gas and checking tires. If I know the parking is expensive where I am going now, I will be much less hesitant to take the bus. It’s really relaxing compared with driving.
More than that, I enjoyed the feeling of being part of a community of other bus riders. The only thing I didn’t like is that on Line 68, the repetitive new announcement is mispronouncing Cesar Chavez’s name. When they fix that, I will be MTA’s most ardent fan.
Mary Jacobs
Los Angeles
Fulton recommends that “the winner of the mayoral race should ... focus on express buses and trains and on development patterns” to reduce automobile traffic. How about funding an adequate number of buses so that their schedules can enable us drivers to use public transportation? I badly want to avoid the numbing freeway congestion by using buses to travel from the east San Fernando Valley to the west for a doctor’s appointment.
So I investigated the route by bus. I don’t mind taking the three buses necessary for the trip, especially since bus No. 2 is a Rapid Metro. However, when bus No. 1 runs every 45 minutes and bus No. 3 runs once an hour, why would I spend hours waiting for and riding buses when, with even the miserable drive on the Ventura Freeway, I spend a fraction of that time?
A more frequent bus schedule would make giving up the convenience of a car worthwhile for me. And the city.
Hilma Cohn
North Hollywood
Learn Some Manners
I am a sixtysomething single, white female; for the last 11 years I have relied on the L.A. public transportation system, using it successfully to get me all over the metropolitan area. I couldn’t stop laughing , however, as I read William Fulton’s “A Cool Way to Unclog L.A.”
I can’t imagine the mayor (or anyone who owns a car) being able to navigate the system to get to any desired destination, let alone figure out which buttons to push to purchase a fare when riding the subway. My use of the system is successful largely because I speak three languages: English, Spanish and “Abuse.”
Of course, there are many courteous drivers and some passengers who understand the concept of moving to the back of the bus, but in Los Angeles the concept of “bus etiquette” seems to be largely nonexistent, perhaps because the majority who use the system are not in the least bit interested in a pleasant and efficient ride; instead, they spend their time dreaming of the day they can afford a car.
Ruth Kramer Ziony
Los Feliz
Hop the Train
My response to the articles addressing traffic concerns was of disappointment. It seems to me these articles were written by and for the more socially and economically privileged, to find ways of forcing poor people off the streets and freeways to make way for the SUV-driving, cellphone-toting pseudo-elitists.I take the Metro Rail almost every workday. I drive 2.5 miles to the Gold Line Del Mar station in Pasadena, from Union Station downtown I take the Red Line to the Vermont/Sunset station, and walk (yes, walk!) 1.5 miles to work. I’m proud to admit that there is one less maniac on the road when “I go Metro.”
It seems more of a priority for people to show off their free-moving wheels in the safety of their Hummer in gridlock traffic than have to possibly sit next to someone who might be different from themselves on the bus or train. Public transportation can be slow, confusing and frustrating. To help pass the time on this arduous task, you might want to read a book that someone is hawking in the Opinion section or read T.J. Simers in Sports.
Neil Starrett
Pasadena
