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 ne thing that every politician in San Diego seems
to agree on is "we don't want to be like Los Angeles."
Unfortunately, when planning for our growth, they seem to embrace
the item that contributes most to the problems in Los Angeles:
their transportation model. Witness their current plans to widen
Interstate 5 to 23 lanes near Highway 56: wider than any highway
in the Los Angeles area.
 Metropolitan
Transit Development Board consultant Alan Hoffman has calculated
that our projected growth will require 1,300 lane-miles of freeways,
based on our existing traffic model (equivalent to six Interstate
805 freeways). He also states that this will result in a need
for 37 square miles of parking required for these vehicles. This
sure sounds like Los Angeles to me!
As Edmond
Burke once said, "You can never plan for the future by the
past." So why don't we look to other areas of the world
for workable solutions? Like Curtiba, Brazil, who rejected the
idea of road widening to solve their city gridlock problem and
instead closed all of the streets in a large downtown area. The
result of this approach was the creation of the most efficient
bus system in the world.
On a trip
I took last September to Ireland, I was fascinated by their different
approach to transportation and wondered how these ideas might
work in San Diego. Due to Ireland's history of wars and disasters,
they were financially unable to develop extensive rail systems
like other western European countries. Their transportation philosophy,
however, is not one of automobile dependence, but rather one
of automobile tolerance.
Upon arriving
at the airport in Dublin, our introduction to Irish transportation
came when we picked up our rental car. The "mid-sized"
Opal we had reserved would be classified as a "small car"
at any automobile rental in America. We then noticed that our
car, as well as most of the cars in the rental lot, had doors
on the driver side and passenger side badly gouged. This, I learned,
was an "omen" regarding the non-accommodating traffic
lanes and parking spaces we would be encountering on our trip.
Most of the
traffic lanes we drove on were one to two feet narrower than
the San Diego standard. Parking spaces are infrequent and also
narrower than home. The busses, which run frequently, are no
wider than a passenger car and double decked to efficiently serve
narrow neighborhood streets.
Between the
smaller cities, roadways are as narrow as sixteen feet and are
usually lined with trees so that neighboring residents can't
see them. It is common to encounter a herd of sheep blocking
the road that serves as a natural "traffic calming"
device. We were told that if you hit any sheep, you must find
the farmer and reimburse him for his loss. If not, you could
be arrested. Between larger cities, the major highways are just
two and one-half lanes in each direction. That's two standard
twelve-foot lanes and one eight-foot shoulder that is shared
between bicyclists, stranded cars and slower vehicles.
It's not that
Ireland doesn't have a train system; major cities are connected
by efficient train service and the Dublin Area Rapid Transit
(DART) light rail system is undergoing a major expansion.
At a restaurant
we stopped at in Yeats Country, on the West Coast of Ireland,
we met a young Irish student who had just come back from going
to school in Montana. She told us that automobiles are not as
revered in Ireland as she found them to be in America. She stated
that students in Irish high schools or universities that commute
by automobile rather than bicycle or mass transit are viewed
as "spoiled" or "decadent." Voters had also
chosen to impose a tax on the purchase of larger vehicles to
discourage excessive energy use.
While driving
between Dublin and Waterford, I was passed by a train that appeared
to be full, while there was practically no traffic on the highway.
While the train passed, I kept thinking: how could we get people
in San Diego out of their cars and on to trains like this. Then,
all of the sudden, it hit me! I started to think instead of how
Ireland could encourage their population to get off the transit
and into cars.
First of all,
they would add several highway lanes and make the lanes wider
to accommodate luxury vehicles. Next they would raise the price
of a train ticket and travel to fewer locations on inconvenient
schedules. They would then reduce the cost of gasoline so that
it would be cheaper than transit travel. Finally, they would
make parking convenient and abundant in every city. This is precisely
what we are doing in San Diego everything that can possibly be
done to discourage mass transit!
Thankfully,
this is not what is happening in Ireland. Although it is the
fastest growing economy in Europe, they are spending very little
on expanding their road system. In driving over 2200 miles around
the country, we did not see one single road-widening project.
We also saw only one sport utility vehicle. We later found out
that the government is spending all of their money on busses,
trains and incentives to use "park and ride" facilities.
Although gasoline cost more than $4 per gallon, we never heard
any of the "whining" we hear back home. In fact, the
newspaper headlines we read indicated that the voters wanted
to "increase" the tax on gasoline to decrease automobile
use and meet their Kyoto emission standards.
Ironically,
our model Los Angeles is reaching the point of saturation of
its freeway system and adopting a philosophy similar to Ireland's.
The vast majority of the $82.5 billion budget prepared by the
Southern California Association of Governments is going to rail
systems and programs to make better use of existing highways
without expansion. Their $4.3 billion light-rail expansion brings
back memories of a rejected light rail proposal proposed in LA
thirty years ago at a fraction of the cost.
We can now
predict what will happen if we continue with the same transportation
model, and need only look 100 miles north to see what type of
legacy we will leave our children. It's not a question of if
we will need to stop adding lanes and focus on new transit ideas,
but when and at what cost.
If we don't
change now, ten years from now the residents of Los Angeles may
start telling their politicians "we don't want to be like
San Diego." 
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