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 very
smart friend of mine, made the following observation about politics:
"Don't sweat it Carolyn, politics is designed to discourage
people." I had been expressing my personal angst over how
the culture in the so-called "Smart Growth Coalition"
Transportation subcommittee had evolved.
 From
the first meeting, the "we know the answers already"
contingents had passed out the parts of their agendas they wanted
to make public.
There is a
major initiative being pursued mostly by the development and
chamber types to build more and bigger roads as the answer to
our dreams. It's called GAPS and there is a "white paper"
entitled "Halting the dismantling of San Diego's Roadway
System." To give you a sense of their orientation, the group
is called the San Diego Highway Development Association.
Quite a few
members of the "Smart Growth Coalition" Transportation
Committee are people who have already "bought in" to
the GAPS strategy. Their simplistic rationale is that we have
more traffic congestion because we haven't built all the roads
we should have. The solution is therefore to build more roads.
It's an example of defining the problem to get the answer you
want. Many of them support building roads at the expense of all
other alternatives. Their strategy is to push for reevaluation
of all the roads that have been downgraded or deleted in the
County over the years.
The problem
is that transportation research has shown that the more roads
you build, the more traffic you get. Regions that have invested
heavily in road construction have fared no better at easing congestion
than those that have invested less. But these people simply do
not believe in limits. They are the heart of the "we can
build our way out of anything" crowd.
Just to set
the record straight from the get go -- I'm not against all roads
or cars in general. As a Southern California native, I think
it's genetically impossible. I've owned a car since college and
I use the road system frequently.
What I'm against
is pollution, traffic and fragmentation of our remaining natural
areas. I'm also against systems that discriminate and segregate
people by race and class; there is no question that roadways
contribute to this. By design, roads provide no direct access
for the young, the poor or many of the disabled and elderly who
make up one-third of our population. Road domination also drives
resources away from making other alternatives competitive.
No one, from
experts to lay people, has been able to answer my simple question
of how we could build an effective road system at an acceptable
cost to accommodate another million cars. Our cities have not
been planned, designed or built to absorb -- or shall we say,
cram in -- another million cars. But we're evidently going to
try, whether it's smart or not. Some are recommending that we
just continue to widen I-5 up to 10, 12 or 14 lanes, depending
on the section, and widen several arterial routes. Even if they
could take the right-of-ways, where does it end?
Actually,
it's not quite true that the experts haven't told me how to cram
in the cars. The answer is: you can't. It's just that the professional
planning establishment can't point it out that bluntly. Any real
solutions either cost too much or are a threat to existing spending
priorities. So it's buried in long sentences that amount to that.
Alan Hoffman
of The Mission Group, a local transportation consulting firm,
has calculated that, based on the current SANDAG base data, the
addition of 1 million people to the region will lead to approximately
685,000 additional cars.
Hoffman's
analysis shows, "If only one in six cars is on the freeway
at the peak commuting time, and we're willing to limit these
cars to a maximum speed of about 30 MPH, the region will need
to add the equivalent of close to six entire new I-805s (or,
in other words, 1300 lane-miles) just to hold these cars. If
you want these cars to flow freely (at 65 MPH), we'll need close
to eleven new I-805s. Of course, the arterial network has little
room in many places to receive these cars, should they seek to
leave the freeway, and all the new lane miles will do nothing
to improve current conditions."
One of the
main things I've learned in studying transportation networks
is that they meet the definition of complex systems. A main aspect
of complex systems is that they respond in ways that are counterintuitive.
Common sense does not necessarily apply - especially when you've
reached certain threshold conditions.
There is ample
evidence that investment in new roads and freeways does almost
nothing for increased mobility, since the pattern of growth will
follow the new highway capacity, quickly reducing the new roads
to the same gridlock that plagued the old ones. In the meantime,
city streets and other urban transportation corridors and systems
suffer from lack of investment and there are fewer alternatives
if the public moneys are all, or almost all, put into roads.
The United
States has built the most roads at the expense of other travel
modes. Drivers in 70 metropolitan areas spend an average of 40
hours per year sitting in stalled traffic. Wasted fuel and lost
productivity costs $74 billion annually.
Hoffman points
out, "We have to stop asking the auto to do what it's not
good at doing: getting us from where lots of other people are
to where lots of other people are going. For these kinds of trips,
rapid transit is unparalleled. What cars are best at doing is
getting us from where relatively few people are to where few
others are going. If we want to preserve this kind of mobility,
we've got to stop depending on the auto for that first kind of
trip."
On another
level, I was most sorry to see the suggestion that the reopening
of deleted roads battles is smart. It's not smart to go after
opening old political battles where the wounds are deep and local.
It's just more of the same old paradigm kicking in again. It
revealed a lack of political sophistication that I found shocking.
It's not smart, not smart at all, but divisive - which is the
last thing you need if you are trying to actually build a coalition.
Certainly road improvements are going to be needed, but it's
not smart to shove every deleted and downgraded road onto the
table and promote a plan designed with the thinking of the late
1950s. We have learned a few things since then.
The GAPS party
line seems to be that if everyone just abided by the plans, everything
would have worked out. But when you really start to look at the
list of roads, you get an interesting education. Few of the deleted
or downgraded roads have a significant relationship to the major
problem traffic spots on I-5 and I-15. In my part of the city,
the road downgrades looked to be great savings to taxpayers and
unneeded even today.
In a bit of
political irony, during the same time this committee was meeting,
the San Diego City Council held a hearing endorsing the GAPS
process. A week later though, they voted to permit a project
in the right-of-ways of one of the major disputed roads. Consistency
is not necessarily a virtue in politics, I guess.
GAPS is a
disingenuous call to hew to central planning when it fits certain
interests and not others. What about the democracy these people
seem to cherish in most of their other political rhetorical battles?
Isn't it really that they like democracy when it goes their way,
and they don't like it when it doesn't? When they want their
General Plan Amendments to go through, shouldn't we just be telling
them that they should just forget it and stick with the plan?
A lot of thinking people would support that. Somehow, I think
there are gaps in this process and it's not just with some roads.
I think there are also some gaps in thinking and fairness involved
here as well.
On a positive
note, I can report that the GAPS plan is not part of the final
recommendations being put forth by the Smart Growth Coalition
Transportation Group, though it was a battle right to the end.
There were a few members of the group who really don't get that
coalition building is about finding common ground, not just common
pavement. 
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