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  s we all crawl
along in the 21st century, it seems the only thing that's not
congested in our regional transportation systems is the flow
of money. It's the one feature that everyone administering the
system agrees should be rigorously maintained and increased.
 As for
other features, such as reductions in commute times and competitive
alternatives to the car, well, that would mean substantive and
perhaps difficult changes. Mostly, everyone in the system agrees
there are problems, and changes might be needed. But they just
can't bring themselves to do anything about it. And why should
they? Is there anyone or anything requiring them to improve system
performance? Not that I've been able to find.
One of the
key organizing principles of SANDAG, our official regional transportation
planning agency, is political consensus. Political consensus
has seldom if ever been an effective basis for producing results
from complex, expensive systems. It is, however, the time-honored
way to divvy up the available cash flowing through such systems.
More than
anything else, the Regional Transportation Plan is ultimately
a political document designed to split up and justify the state
and federal funding divided among the three major insider interest
groups: regional highways, local streets and transit. This covers
all the major players: Caltrans, local jurisdictions represented
on the SANDAG Board, and then all the rest of the agencies vie
to provide some kind of mass transit from the leftovers. Everyone
involved in planning and managing the system is getting something,
while the rest of us are getting stuck in traffic, getting few
viable alternatives, and being asked to pay more for the "pleasure."
When all these
agencies and politicians get together, should we be surprised
that their prescription is more tax increases for poor performance?
Everyone involved sells this formula as a "balanced approach."
The only problem is that what they are balancing is the split
of the funding, and not actually linking it higher performance
standards for the systems they are funding.
With billions
of taxpayers dollars chasing projects, evidently the best our
new Draft Regional Transportation Plan can offer is a system
-- being billed as "improved" -- that will, over twenty
years, purport to reduce congestion from 63 miles of congested
freeway segments today to 29 miles of congested segments. They
assure us we will approach this with a mere $12 billion tax increase
(if we're lucky). I say lucky, because there is evidently nothing
to assure even that dismal outcome.
The beginning
of my education on congestion politics was awaiting me when I
attempted to determine how much time San Diegans were spending
trapped in traffic and how this was changing over time. Turns
out that none of the documents I've reviewed reports data with
respect to time, and there appears to be no requirement to do
so. I was further surprised that SANDAG also does not know how
many miles of congestion there are on area freeways. Although
I have written about the "miles of congestion" in the
past, and the new RTP is being sold to officials and the public
on that basis, I have come to discover that SANDAG does not report
congestion either in terms of actual miles or time.
SANDAG looks
at freeways in terms of segments -- which range in size from
less than a mile to many miles. The reduction in congestion figures
they cite actually refers to the mileage of the segments on which
the forecast demand exceeds rated capacity at "Level of
Service F" -- where traffic has already been reduced to
stop-and-go and delays at intersections are more than one minute.
So each of those 63 miles represent segments where traffic will
just BEGIN to back up behind that segment. The numbers they cite
do not actually represent the number of miles of congestion.
I've come
to think of is this way: each congested segment is like a rat
moving through a snake. So really what we have is 63 POINTS along
the system behind which the congestion backs up an unknown amount.
(By the way, they also do not measure or account for congestion
backing up into local neighborhoods.)
Congestion
actually starts to back up at LOS D. The 1996 list of "Levels
of Service" (LOS) for freeway segments listed more than
57 miles of segments at LOS E and more than 44 miles of segments
of LOS D, in addition to the 63 miles of segments already at
LOS F. (Note: Unlike other more familiar grading systems, in
order to further delineate our underachievements, they have added
the grade of "E" between "D" and "F"
-- perhaps so we don't have to go directly from poor to failing.)
Interestingly
enough, although SANDAG recently released a new draft of the
Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), including a required update
to our region's Congestion Management Plan (CMP), they have not
yet released the major substantive element of the CMP, an updated
LOS ratings chart for our region's freeways and major arterials.
Since this has not been released, I wonder what basis they have
for even concluding that their forecasts will "improve"
things to "only" 29 miles of LOS F segments. They need
to release that data to the public as soon as possible. But at
the recent SANDAG Board meeting where new RTP documents were
officially released for public comment, this omission was not
even brought up.
At this same
meeting, members of SANDAG's Board of Directors discussed State
Senator Steve Peace's RITA proposal to reorganize agencies currently
involved in transportation planning, including SANDAG. Many board
members admitted that the current system "has problems"
and that things could certainly be "done better." Others
suggested that SANDAG mount "huge" public education
campaigns to get out the word about what they do. Unfortunately,
commuters get a daily education on the results of what is being
done and not done.
The recently
released Draft RTP, which includes a required update to our region's
Congestion Management Plan, provides no significant congestion
management policy changes.
There is little
reason to believe that those failed policies, if continued as
proposed, will provide for significant congestion relief, regardless
of how much money we provide. Should we really be excited that
they are proposing to raise taxes by $12 billion for a system
where the congestion may only go from horrible to terrible? 
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