Transportation in Los Angeles

These are reflections on a recent visit to Los Angeles to examine people and goods movement in L.A. County and steps in progress to improve these movements.

The dominant impression is one of incredulity. It is almost beyond belief that a people so imaginative and resourceful in other areas of technology and its management can be so inept at tackling a major problem right on their own doorstep.

What has been done over the past two decades and projects now under way or firmly funded will not produce a significant change in transport efficiency. Aside from being much too little, much too late, the proposed Metro Rail and Long Beach and Century light-rail lines must be one integrated system, with one type of rolling stock and power supply and a single ticketing and information system. If a recipe for certain failure were needed, one should build six systems with seven identities--and watch the potential customers stay in their automobiles.

The present deficiencies are glaring and can be quantified under headings such as: travel speed and comfort, energy expended per unit moved, accident and fatality levels, land-use for a given task and environmental damage.

One runs no risk in predicting that the continued Balkanization of political entities in Los Angeles County will not produce a solution. You are invited to pin this on your wall and re-read it in March of 1998.

A single entity is needed, free from the day-to-day pushing and shoving of local and state politicians. It must have a statutory life which is commensurate with the design life of the system it is asked to shape. This life is measured in decades and not the weeks or months to the next election.

The needed authority must enable this entity to integrate land-use and transport planning for all modes--one without the other inevitably leads to nonsense. Within a broad framework, dozens of variants for building and transport structures are possible and many vehicle types are viable for given transport tasks. There is no lack of available land or material resources to implement the needed changes.

Only sticky-plaster solutions will emerge from the extant political mish mash. It is when an informed electorate starts to ask relevant questions that meaningful steps will be taken to improve transportation.

W. PENZIAS

Associate Lecturer

Urban Traffic Systems

University of Technology

Sydney, Australia