Instead, Los Angeles is known as a world capital of traffic, a place of extreme mobility challenges and a pollution-choked smog-burger. Low-income communities bear much of the burden of our failures—in worse access to jobs and opportunities, more severe health impacts from pollution and long commutes, and higher rates of injuries and collisions in transportation-related accidents.

And despite strong recent efforts, including unprecedented amounts of investment in rail and other transit infrastructure, things are poised to get worse. Vehicle purchases are on the rise, continuing a pre-pandemic trend. Despite more telecommuting, traffic is back with a vengeance and transit ridership remains depressed.

How did we get here? Because over the course of our history we have chosen to provide the benefits of that massive public investment in transportation almost exclusively to private vehicles, and at almost zero cost to drivers. Those vehicles mostly carry only one person at a time, churn out dangerous pollutants, and are not available to a very large segment of the population who cannot drive, choose not to drive, or cannot afford to drive. We should not be surprised at the outcome.

Yes, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians can use roads—but buses must combat traffic while biking and walking are often dangerous. Every year in L.A. County, speeding cars strike and kill hundreds of people and injure thousands more.

These realities have been produced by the choices we made as a region, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Los Angeles has the infrastructure to support the greatest transportation system ever known. We are just completely misusing it.

Imagine a world where this fantastic infrastructure investment really works, for everyone. What if Angelenos—whether they choose to drive, walk, bike, take transit, or even stay home—could be free from traffic, pollution, and physical harm? It’s achievable if we change how we choose to use our road space.

To start, we can put exclusive bus lanes and protected bike lanes on our major thoroughfares. Then we can run more and faster bus service, expand our bike share programs, and perhaps even distribute bicycles to those who cannot afford them. We can ensure sidewalks on every street and curb cuts on every corner, plus bus shelters to protect waiting passengers from the sun. We can lower speed limits even more on city streets, enforce traffic laws, and create more pedestrian crosswalks that give people more time to cross.

Then we get to the hard part: We need to stop giving away roadway space for free.

Have you ever tried to get an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on free cone day? Have you noticed that there is always a line, so that even though the cone is free, you wind up paying with your time? If you don’t mind waiting in line, or if waiting in line is fun because you are with friends, it’s no big deal. But imagine you need that ice cream cone to survive, so you must wait in line for it every day.

This is what it is like to be a commuter in Los Angeles. Your roadway space is free, but because you need that space to get to work or school or wherever you have to be, you have no choice but to wait in line to use it. So, you listen to music, or books on tape, or call your mom as you sit in traffic. This is the life we have chosen for ourselves.

But what if our roads looked more like a Ben and Jerry’s the other 364 days of the year? What if we sold the product that is in high demand instead of giving it away for free? The result would be the same as with any other product—shorter lines (i.e., less traffic). The concept is known as congestion pricing and has been used for years in cities such as London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. New York recently approved a similar concept.

Taken as a package, congestion pricing, in combination with improvements to our road network, would dramatically transform Los Angeles. Traffic would drop, pollution would drop, and the entire system would become far more equitable. The net cost of these changes would be zero, since congestion pricing revenues could likely pay for the improvements to biking, walking, and bus commuting—all of which cost much less than highway improvement and new rail projects.

So why do we insist on making every day free cone day?

Each of the above ideas faces serious obstacles. An exclusive bus lane or a new bike lane typically requires taking away a lane of existing traffic. The new lane could potentially move far more people far faster, and those people are likely to be predominantly low-income and minority. But drivers typically balk at giving up a lane—and take their concern directly to their elected officials.

Adding sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and bus shelters might seem relatively non-controversial, but many neighborhoods resist these as well on the grounds that they might slow traffic or “change the character” of a neighborhood, and they are typically not a budget priority. Reducing speed limits and enforcing them is not only unpopular, but also challenging due to state laws and limited resources.

But the largest problem is cultural. In the land of the freeway, what could be more controversial than charging people to drive?

Fortunately, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), is undertaking a traffic reduction study to examine how we might package together a combination of street improvements and congestion pricing for Los Angeles County.

Fun fact: we call them freeways because they’re supposed to be free flowing. The name has nothing to do with the cost, but rather with the operational intent. An intent we collectively have the power to fulfill.

LA Metro’s study is aiming to build support for a pilot program that could test the ideas above. Some lucky area—one with terrible traffic—will be a proving ground for whether they improve the health, safety, environment, and access for everyone equitably. If it works, perhaps more parts of L.A. will demand these changes, too. If it doesn’t, well, we can always go back to our traffic-choked ways.

Moving forward with congestion pricing, exclusive bus and bike lanes, better bus service, and other improvements will take greater political courage than we have seen in recent years. These changes inherently disrupt and expose the existing inequities in our society by improving services for non-drivers, who tend to be low-income and people of color, and asking drivers to pay their fair share. But isn’t this what most of our elected officials claim to stand for?

We already have the solutions to L.A.’s longstanding traffic, pollution and mobility inequities. Now we just have to decide whether to choose them.

The post How to Imagine a Los Angeles Without Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No? OK, maybe you’re not ready to recognize how much you need me. I understand.

I know you’ve never liked me, and for that I’ve never blamed you. You Californians like to live your lives fast, and I’m all about slowing you down. So I try not to let it bother me that you complain about me more than drought or Donald Trump.

I understand that I make you late to school and to work. I lengthen brutal commutes that keep you behind the wheel for hours when you’d rather be working out, watching a game or playing with your kids. And I contribute to pollution that causes everything from asthma to climate change.

But give me this much: When COVID-19 came, and I took a vacation, California suddenly didn’t feel like California anymore.

At first, you celebrated my disappearance as a rare ray of light in a dark time. The roads were wide open. You could actually get from downtown San Diego to North County, or from Pasadena to Long Beach, or from San Francisco to Palo Alto, in 30 minutes. The Bay Area bridges were no longer jammed. Even when businesses started to reopen, traffic was less than 80 percent of normal around the state.

But as the pandemic drags on, I suspect many of you secretly wish I would come back. There is something disorienting, even apocalyptic, about all those empty roads. Your state just isn’t the same without me.

Truth be told, under normal circumstances, California isn’t the most congested place in the United States. Much of our giant state is empty, while Hawai‘i’s small island roads are packed with too many Californians who like to drive. My fearsome reputation is really based on the fact that California’s giant urban regions have some of the world’s worst traffic.

People also tend to dwell on my costs—in gas, vehicle maintenance, air quality, and lives—without appreciating the many benefits I provide. Now that those benefits have vanished, I wonder if you might give me a little more respect.

For starters, I’m the best excuse you have for your flakiness and irresponsibility. When you’re ludicrously late to school or work, or when you miss your brother’s wedding, all you need is to invoke me, traffic, and your fellow Californians will absolve you of your sins. Now, in the pandemic, you probably don’t have to be anywhere, but if you do, and you’re late, you’ve got no excuse. You’re just rude!

So, in the spirit of forgiveness, I hope that COVID has given you a more permissive perspective on time. Transportation agencies across California like to issue studies that accuse me, traffic, of being a thief, by robbing from you 60 or 80 or 100 hours of time each year that you could instead have spent with your families. But now that so many of you are stuck with your families all the time, I detect a new appreciation for all the quality time you used to spend stuck with me. I let you listen to whatever awful music you like without ever complaining. Can you say the same of your kids?

Those points may seem trivial, but the carnage on our roads—more than 3,500 traffic deaths annually—is serious. And the pandemic suggests that my talent for congestion actually keeps you safer. In the early weeks of the lockdown, traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths dropped precipitously. But since then, without me around to slow people down, drivers have been speeding, and the roads have gotten much deadlier. In fact, even with much less traffic, we’re on track to have just as many deaths on the roads this year as we did in 2019, which is why Californians are seeing roadside warnings to slow down.

Controlling speeding is just one of the many social goods for which I, traffic, deserve more credit. Research shows that, despite conventional wisdom that traffic slows commerce, congestion is good for the economy and jobs. So you won’t escape economic depression without me.

I support millions of jobs directly, from car dealerships to car repair shops and car washes (I’m very proud of the fact that California leads the nation in per-capita car washes). But I also create positive economic incentives. I’m a force for innovation, encouraging the concentration of high-tech and other industries. And the gas taxes that drivers pay is how our society funds much of its transportation infrastructure, and the construction jobs that come with it.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m also a huge proponent of public transportation. People get on trains and buses to avoid dealing with me. Now transit ridership has completely collapsed, and that’s not all because of fear of the virus. I’m no longer there to scare drivers. My buddies at BART have lost most of their ridership, and Caltrain, which connects San Francisco and San Jose by rail, may go under. Local and state governments will have to bail out transit systems until I can return to do my essential artery-clogging work.

I don’t limit my environmental work to supporting transit. Fear of my congestion also creates incentives for infill development in dense urban areas, and for people to live closer to work, to walk and bike more, and to use ridesharing rather than owning cars. Best of all, congestion forces people to congregate in places, where they can talk, plan a rally, or meet a significant other.

You may still hate me, but I create opportunities for you to fall in love!

That’s why I’m asking you to wear those masks and maintain social distance. The sooner California can beat back the pandemic, the sooner you and I can be together again.

The post Don’t Be Ashamed to Admit It<span class="colon">:</span> You Miss California Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Jevons’ observations on coal also have something to say about the Oshiya (train pushers) who squeeze every last person onto subway cars in Tokyo, and about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent declaration of a transit emergency for New York’s famed subway system.

Jevons wrote that an increase in the efficiency of coal production would stimulate increased demand for coal. Jevons’ reasoning was that more efficient coal production would lead to lower prices. And Economics 101 tells us that lower prices lead to more consumption—perhaps, in this case, creating so much more demand that it would outstrip the capacity to produce coal.

In such a scenario, the production of coal might be increased to meet the heightened demand, but that would require marginal mines to be brought into operation. Given that these mines would be less efficient, prices necessarily would rise to cover the additional cost. Prices would not initially increase back to their old levels, but as the population grew it would generate additional demand for coal and such a rebound in prices might well occur.

These same insights about coal are applicable to mass transportation systems—particularly freeways. Last February, the Dutch firm TomTom, which produces traffic, navigation, and mapping products, drew on the brave new world of big data to release their 2016 index of traffic congestion. Our region, the Pacific Rim, was the clear “winner”—or, I should say, the clear loser. Seven of the top 10 congested cities are on the Pacific Rim and Los Angeles leads the list of American cities.

Anyone who travels the cities around the rim can attest to snarled traffic in Jakarta, Beijing, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The question “What are we going to do about traffic?” is a constant source of conversation, particularly here in L.A., and it is pervasive enough to have given rise to the parody “The Californians” on Saturday Night Live.

There would seem to be two ways to ease traffic congestion: build more capacity, or reduce the number of people who use the existing capacity. Yet, just as with Jevons’ coal demand, traffic seems to expand to meet whatever capacity exists. And this is not just a Los Angeles or Beijing problem. In 1990, British transportation analyst Martin Mogridge observed it as a more general characteristic of highways, and it is now enshrined in transportation planning circles as the “Lewis-Mogridge Position.”

Why is it that cities cannot build enough capacity to solve the problem? The answer may lie in two factors: the price of housing, and the pricing of congestion.

Let’s start with the price of housing. The purchase or rental price of a home reflects the sum value of many characteristics of that home. In this column, I have often written about how proximity to natural amenities, such as beaches and mountains, makes housing more expensive. But proximity to work also is an important consideration. The closer to work, the shorter the commute time, and the more valuable will be the home.

But it is commuting time and not linear distance that matters most. Consequently, when you increase the capacity of transportation infrastructure, you get shorter commute times—at least initially. And that makes homes close to the new infrastructure initially more attractive.

Intensifying congestion, however, will affect a home’s price. At 3 a.m., the opportunity cost of traveling the freeway to a destination is practically zero. It takes a little time, and that is a cost, but not much. But in rush hour when freeway speeds are slow, the opportunity cost increases with the additional time spent sitting in your car listening to The Grateful Dead on the radio. The more cars there are (higher demand), the more time is required to crawl through rush hour (the higher cost).

Here is where Jevons’ idea comes in. When there is not much congestion, one can live further away from work where home prices are lower, and still arrive at work on time without spending too much more time commuting. Consequently, building another lane on the freeway opens up more residential options.

So adding capacity makes two big things happen. First, there is an increased demand for the housing that is now within driving distance to work; and second, more people will use the freeways to get to work. This leads to more freeway congestion and ultimately longer commute times for everyone. Empirically we see this happening quite fast, and eventually the new lane has done nothing to ease congestion.

There are a number of solutions to this. One is to build mass transit and induce people to use it. This is the favored solution of urban planners today because mass transit is a more efficient means of transportation. It can carry many more people per dollar spent on building, maintaining, and operating the transit than the highways can.

But with mass transit, as with highways, the same principles of capacity and demand apply. When Japan began building the Tokaido Shinkansen (high-speed rail) in 1959, it was, in part, intended to ease the burden of commuting in densely packed Tokyo. Today, anyone who rides the rail line, especially in rush hour, knows what a sardine feels like when packed into a flat tin can. In this case the cost is not time, but the discomfort of cheek-to-jowl train ridership.

Another solution to the problem of increased capacity driving demand is to convert lanes on the freeways to toll lanes. This is a favorite of economists because people who value time more will pay a premium to avoid the costs of congestion. Consequently, the scarce resource—road space—will be rationed according to its relative value to consumers. Of course, it is not only the value of time that matters in the decision; income—the ability to pay tolls—does as well. Adding a toll lane allows rich people to drive fast and reduces the capacity on the freeway for everyone else. And that raises issues of equity for infrastructure built with tax dollars.

The other problem with toll lanes is that there is an alternative to either paying for the less congested toll lane, or driving in the now more congested free lanes: driving on surface streets. With navigation apps such as Waze, drivers can take the nearest off-ramp and motor through residential neighborhoods. When they do that, they expose residential neighborhoods to the congestion, noise, and pollution that the freeways were originally built to eliminate.

Moreover, a 2001 article by Ingo Hansen of Delft University of Technology suggests that transportation analysis of toll roads gets it all wrong. His research indicates that when fed-up freeway commuters start taking app-directed shortcuts through residential areas, the local roads quickly become clogged, hampering residents’ ability to make short trips or run errands. These residents are now competing with longer-distance drivers, and so they, too, pay a cost in congestion, safety, and pollution. Indeed, this Waze phenomenon induced L.A. City Councilman Paul Krekorian in 2015 to suggest new government regulations for local street usage.

So, toll roads don’t seem to be a complete answer either. Recognizing this, Mexico City, Beijing, and other cities have followed the example of Julius Caesar, who in 1st Century BCE Rome banned chariots from the center city during the day, except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the late afternoon. Romans responded by moving their trips to the allowable four hours each day—thereby creating epic chariot jams.

Today Singapore uses a combination of policies to limit the number of cars on the roads. First there is a quota system that limits the number of cars on the island. Second, those who have cars are charged for driving them through a sophisticated system that measures where they are and when they are driving. This system will be improved shortly with the installation of GPS monitors in each car.

These are useful alternatives. But let’s remember our friend Jevons. Policies to limit traffic might not do much, even with the best of planning, so long as the city we live in is attractive to a lot of people. An oft-heard refrain about my hometown is: “I would love to live in L.A. but couldn’t stand the traffic.” If you make traffic better, more people would move here, and traffic would get worse. Congestion costs ration limited space and this reduces the number of people moving in.

All we can do for now is stay ahead of the game in the best way possible. Provide incentives for people to use the least-used modes of transportation and plan for the increases in population that will invariably happen to cities that are attractive to people from far-flung lands. Perhaps the advent of self-driving autos will provide the bandwidth to break the traffic jam for good, but perhaps not. What will be required is to engage transportation planning with housing planning in a way that recognizes the close tie between the cost of congestion and the price of housing.

On the bright side, if you are late for something in one of the Pacific Rim’s notoriously congested cities, simply saying “Sorry, traffic!” is sufficient to get you by.

The post Why Building More Freeways Makes Traffic Worse, Not Better appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Automobile Magazine editor-in-chief Mike Floyd, the evening’s moderator, offered a preview of what was to come by explaining how each panelist had gotten to the downtown L.A. venue: One person walked, one took the bus, one mapped out the side streets, and another drove—and got caught in traffic.

That alone proves that cars and car culture are not dead. But the landscape is shifting. “It’s harder to notice it happening in L.A.,” said Drexel University Center for Mobilities Research and Policy director Mimi Sheller. But a national and global transition is taking place. Fewer young people are driving cars and getting licenses. Since 2004—well before the recession—the total vehicle miles traveled has dropped. Congestion, pollution, and other changes “are going to lead to new legal and regulatory frameworks that will put pressure on car culture as we know it,” said Sheller.

DUB Magazine founder Myles Kovacs said that he thinks millennials are car-averse not because of the environment but because of financial issues—they’ve seen their parents struggling with car payments and gas—and because of shifts in technology and culture. They don’t need cars to drive to friends’ houses when they can talk online instead. They don’t want to be like their parents. And they’re less independent than previous generations.

But there still is enthusiasm for cars out there. Petersen Automotive Museum executive director Terry Karges said that the Forza Motorsport driving game has 43 million Xbox subscribers and 200,000 to 300,000 players at any given time of day. And people around Los Angeles continue to get together around the cars they own and love, whether they’re Porsches or Ferraris or British cars. You also still have people buying basic, functional cars, he said. But “a Camry isn’t necessarily something you would join a club to adore,” he said.

Most people I know who aren’t car people just want to get back and forth to work with the least amount of fuss possible, said Floyd. Is that attitude going to take over?

Sheller said that as digital companies—such as Google and Apple—move into transportation, “it’s no longer about selling cars, it’s about selling mobility services.” She said that it’s possible to imagine a future where vehicle time is sold like minutes on a cell phone plan—and those minutes are combined with transportation options that include walking, biking, and public transit.

Architect Deborah Murphy, founder of Los Angeles Walks, said that shared cars mean fewer parking spaces and fewer surface parking lots. She added that technology is changing not just cars but how people exercise these options. An app can tell you how long a trip will take by foot or on the bus, how much it will cost on Lyft, and how many calories you’ll burn by bike.

But technology won’t change everything. A particular car matches a particular lifestyle, said Kovacs. It’s about belonging to a group of like-minded people with the same car and the same dream.

Regardless, said Murphy, “everybody’s a pedestrian”—even if you’re just walking from your car to your office. And Los Angeles, she said, is in the midst of a huge investment in infrastructure thanks to Measure R, a sales tax that funds highways, rail lines, and the bus system.

However, cars still have a certain appeal. Kovacs said he got into cars “for the ladies,” and that car culture will exist “until people stop paying attention” to the colors and customization.

“My joy and my freedom is getting in my car and taking a drive,” added Karges. “My best moments are on the 101 or Highway 1 going up the coast.”

However, said Murphy, getting out of a car allows for more human connections. People can talk while walking or riding bicycles. They can meet people. You don’t get that in a car.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to look ahead. How do we weigh what we need today against what we should build for the future?

Sheller said that we are currently locked into an infrastructure that was built under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the question isn’t just whether we want to rebuild roads and bridges; it’s whether we want to invest more creatively, and about how technology will disrupt existing systems. Future roads may require not just paving but installing sensors, for instance.

How quickly is the autonomous car coming?

“I don’t think we have any idea of what cars are going to be in 20 years or even 10 years, the way things are working right now,” said Karges.

Floyd added that the obstacles to autonomous cars include both the millions of cars currently on the road and liability issues that Kovacs had mentioned earlier in the evening.

What is the current state of car culture in Southern California?

Kovacs said that while the popularity of organized car shows is waning, people are coming together informally for cruises, meets, and “car and coffee” experiences. Cars remain a social experience—but that experience is changing.

The post The Car Is Not Dead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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Seleta Reynolds, who became general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation earlier this year, agreed. But she said that myths about L.A.’s identity persist, and if we want to become a truly 21st-century city, we’ve got to bust those myths and offer more transportation choices.

Where do you start this myth-busting, asked the evening’s moderator, Los Angeles News Group deputy opinion editor Jessica Keating.

Put downtown Los Angeles in the center of a circle that’s the size of the cities of Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., said Reynolds. The city you’ll find in that radius looks very much like those other cities, with people walking, biking, taking taxis, and riding mass transit. Thanks to new technology (like Uber), a burgeoning economy, and even traffic, Angelenos want to use streets in a different way, said Reynolds.

Paley agreed, although he said that in some ways, Los Angeles today is two co-existing cities. In one, people drive everywhere. In the other, people are embracing different kinds of transportation.

The latter city is not made up of just millennials, said Reynolds. Baby boomers are increasingly turning their backs on driving. And Angelenos collectively may love their cars, but they also hate traffic.

Architect and UCLA cityLAB co-director Roger Sherman pointed to a more fundamental shift in Southern California. For a long time, “the freeway was considered to be the source of L.A’s exceptionalism,” said Sherman. “We knew mobility like nobody else did.” And mobility in Los Angeles was about desire as much as it was convenience. Angelenos wanted to drive, they liked driving, and they chose a lifestyle that required it. But the good news, he said, is that Los Angeles can still be exceptional—because this is a city that still believes “mobility is about experience, not just convenience.”

Reynolds concurred, adding that transportation should be fun, and that designing the city’s future should be about more than getting people from point A to point B.

But, said Keating, as great as an “experience” sounds, the idea of riding a bike to a bus and then switching to a train doesn’t seem all that appealing to most people. How do you change the perspectives of people who just want to get in their cars and drive to their destination?

Paley said it’s about starting small: Give people an enjoyable pedestrian experience on the walk from their house to the grocery store.

But even that isn’t easy. Sherman said that transportation planners have neglected the last mile or half-mile of people’s trips, and he doesn’t see the public sector filling that gap any time soon. He does, however, think that tech entrepreneurs and private sector innovators just might be able to enact more change. He pointed to Tokyo, where Japanese department stores built a train system to bring in shoppers, as an example of what such change could look like.

Paley cautioned against the creation of a city that’s not affordable for the people who live here already. He said what he doesn’t want to see is a Los Angeles where the single-passenger automobiles we drive are replaced by single-passenger driverless cars. The future of transportation in L.A. has got to be about enjoying the “pleasures of urban space and interaction”—which wasn’t the original dream of driving down the freeway at 90 mph, he said.

Sherman said that a “dirty little secret” of transportation in Los Angeles is the class differences associated with different ways of getting around.

But that is changing, too, said Paley. When he went carless by choice in the early 1980s, people thought that “a white, Jewish, middle-class kid from the Valley” without a car was insane. The task ahead, he said, is to make transit compelling for everyone.

How big of an investment are L.A.’s elected officials willing to make in such a system?

Reynolds said that transportation funding is less siloed than it used to be—for decades, it was easy to get money in California for bicycle projects but not pedestrian improvements, for example—and that public-private partnerships are going to be key.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked for their “nutshell utopia” vision for L.A’s cityscape.

Paley said his is “multi-modal,” without the “tyranny of the car.”

Reynolds said that hers has zero traffic deaths by 2025. She’s more interested in the journey than the destination—in creating open dialogues among communities and multi-disciplinary experts about the future of our streets, and creating a culture of constant tinkering and innovation.

Sherman said his is “a form of retro-medievalization” where organizations (like neighborhood associations or local nonprofits) are given latitude to undertake creative projects. Los Angeles is becoming more generic than it needs to be, said Sherman. Why, he asked, has the Grove become a sensation? Why do people prefer an ersatz environment over a real street? Because it was created holistically, around one guy’s vision. And perhaps the rest of L.A. could learn something from its success.

The post Will L.A. Escape the Tyranny of the Car? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Metro CEO Art Leahy—whose parents operated Los Angeles streetcars and who started his transit career as an L.A. bus driver—said that much of the progress L.A. has made in combating traffic is thanks to collaboration with and inspiration from other cities around the country and the world. “Los Angeles has the biggest transit development program in the country,” said Leahy. And the past few decades have transformed the city.

Brian Taylor, who directs UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said that a few of L.A.’s most successful transit innovations come directly from Latin America: the Orange Line bus and the rapid bus system.

But a lot of Angelenos still don’t think we’re doing enough to get people off the roads and onto public transportation. KCRW traffic reporter Kajon Cermak, the evening’s moderator, said that she’s often asked why L.A. is adding carpool lanes instead of light rail.

The answer is partly financial, said Leahy. Carpool lanes are federally funded. And it’s simply impossible to build rail everywhere. For example, it would cost “several billion dollars,” he said, to build a rail line over the 405.

“It’s not a good idea to think about rails and freeways together,” said Taylor. Freeways segregate traffic from the rest of the city in order to move people great distances. But on public transit, people need to be able to walk from their starting point to their station, and from the next station to their destination.

Transforming carpool lanes into express lanes—which solo drivers pay more to use during peak hours—has made a difference in L.A. traffic. Hilary Norton, the executive director of Fixing Angelenos Stuck in Traffic, said that L.A.’s express lane program “is the envy of the nation.” Revenue from express lane tolls have been invested back into transit and other projects, and people from around the country visit L.A. to see how this system works.

People get frustrated when they see four regular lanes backed up and two express lanes where traffic is flowing freely. But this is because most of us don’t understand how traffic works, said Taylor. Traffic flows freely until a road gets near capacity; at that time, adding just a few cars creates a huge backup. So while it appears that the express lanes are underutilized, they may in fact be close to capacity. On the 91 Freeway between Corona and Anaheim, said Taylor, 44 percent of drivers are in the two express lanes, while 56 percent of drivers are on the four regular lanes. Yet the express lanes still move much more quickly.

Los Angeles, said Taylor, is a city defined by images others impose on it: It’s the world’s most sprawling metropolitan area. No one uses public transit in L.A. It’s a car city. In reality, however, L.A. is the most densely populated urbanized area in the country. (L.A.’s suburbs are much denser than New York City’s.) The average resident of L.A. drives less than the average U.S. metropolitan resident, and our per capita ridership of public transportation is on par with Baltimore and Seattle.

So what can be done to improve how people see public transportation in Los Angeles?

Leahy said that Metro is training young people to use public transit, including through offering field trips by bus to places like museums.

Norton said that events—like Made in America, the concert at Grand Park that many people traveled to by train, and Dodger games that have shuttle service—give people options, and is how hearts and minds will be changed.

But is there any realistic way to eliminate traffic entirely?

Taylor said there are three ways to end congestion—all of which are politically unpopular. One is to add massive amounts of new capacity, which costs impossible amounts of money and creates a dystopian atmosphere. The second is to put severe restrictions on driving. The third is to put a price on capacity. Without doing any of these three, the next best option is the one L.A. has adopted: providing people with a wide range of options.

In the question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked how housing affordability affects traffic patterns.

Taylor said that housing and commutes affect traffic less than we think. The percentage of vehicles on the road for commuting alone is just 15 percent. Traffic is caused by people running errands during rush hour on their way to and from work. This can make it difficult for people to rely solely on public transportation.. Even if you work and live by two different stops, you still have to get to daycare and the dry cleaner and the store somewhere in between.

Norton said that housing affordability is an issue for a lot of Angelenos: nurses in Monterey Park who commute to Cedars-Sinai, people from El Monte who work at Santa Monica hotels, and LAX workers who can’t afford to live by the airport, for instance.

Is there an affordable technological solution to our clogged freeways?

“The key word is ‘affordable,’” said Leahy. “There are no cheap projects out there.” One Metro plan, currently at a very early stage, is a subway that would run under the Santa Monica Mountains from somewhere in the Valley to somewhere on the Westside—but that project requires a large investment that will likely involve both the private and public sectors, he said.

Ultimately, however, Leahy’s goal is for people to be able to get to any event—a Dodger game, a play, a concert—and take the train home.

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Today, drivers armed with smartphones use apps like Waze, darting on and off freeways to cut commute times by minutes. And this year, L.A. became the world’s first major city to synchronize all of its traffic lights. Yet in 2013, Angelenos still spent an average of 90 hours stuck in traffic. Could a recent infusion of $32 million for transit improvements in the city help recover this lost time? In advance of the Zócalo/Metro event “What Could Speed Up L.A. Traffic?”, we asked transportation experts the following question: What innovations have other cities implemented that could teach L.A. how to speed up traffic?

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That’s the first line from Less Than Zero, Brett Easton Ellis’ infamous 1985 novel of alienation that paints a grim portrait of L.A. When I read it, I thought, “Well, not on every freeway”; but when it comes to Pasadena’s Arroyo Parkway, Ellis has a point. You’d have to be nuts—or suicidal—to roll fearlessly from a stop sign at the end of an entrance ramp directly into traffic zipping by at 60 mph.

The Arroyo Parkway is the oldest section of the 110 Freeway, which, in turn, is the oldest freeway in Los Angeles. What makes the parkway scary is precisely what makes it historic. It is a relic of a slower era; construction began in 1939. It marks the transition from stoplight-interrupted travel to what a 1939 promotional piece called “six glass-smooth miles to downtown.”

“Six glass-smooth miles.” The phrase haunted me. It hinted at a shimmering future, paved by technology. A hopeful future, advanced through engineering. A future that in just a few years would be mocked by the deadly high-tech weaponry of World War II.

The phrase also haunted Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, who was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009 to write an opera pegged to the freeway’s 70th anniversary in 2010. Shannon Halwes, my former writing partner and a lyricist with whom Laura had worked, stumbled upon the phrase when she was searching for articles about the freeway. The three of us teamed up for the project and felt those words needed to be sung. This is how “six glass-smooth miles” found its way into the first aria in One-Ten, Laura’s multimedia opera about the freeway that had a workshop performance at the Pacific Asia Museum and the California African American Museum in November 2009.

The line was included in a duet sung by a pair of star-crossed lovers before their hope for a future together was crushed. They sang it in a darkened car near the freeway construction site–the sort of place where couples have sought privacy from parents since the automobile was first invented.

Laura asked me to join her opera team, I think, because I was obsessed with L.A. history. I had just published Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, a memoir of my difficult rocket-engineer dad and a cultural history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, where he had worked. When one spends months digging through archives and interviewing retired people, one tends to inhabit the past. It’s tough to re-enter the present, so often I didn’t. At dinner parties, I would nerd out about things I had investigated: the development of solid-propellant rocket fuel and the McCarthy-era persecution of JPL’s leftist rocket pioneers. At social gatherings, I became so dull that people ran away from me. But Laura realized that for a venture grounded in history, an encyclopedic bore might be useful.

Laura wanted to explore the idea of the freeway as a river that moved through time and space from its beginning in Pasadena to its terminus in San Pedro. The opera followed this river through the history of the regions it traversed. Because the 110 runs along the city’s eastern edge, skirting Hollywood, our story distinguished itself from shopworn depictions of L.A. that only focus on Tinseltown. The dreamers of our opera were not movie-makers, but Caltech scientists, artists linked to the groundbreaking Pasadena Museum when the legendary Walter Hopps was its director, and African-American jazz musicians who performed on South Central Avenue.

Laura astonished us with the beauty, tenderness, and sheer inventiveness of her melodies. We didn’t have a full orchestra, just a lone accompanist. But, as you can hear in the workshop recordings, the soundscape is enriched with traffic noise, ambient conversations taped during informal discussions of the freeway in different neighborhoods, and clips of historical recordings. To evoke the vernacular of the past, Laura often quoted found text–for example, a gossip column in The California Eagle, an influential African-American newspaper. In collaboration with the filmmaker Kate Hackett, Laura created movies that showed, among many images, freeway signs going by, promotional drawings of the freeway, and people commuting. This allowed the audience to move through time visually. But to get this opera right, we had to get the characters right.

Just as many types of cars merge together on the freeway, we wanted our cast to represent the diverse ethnicities that make up Los Angeles. We also wanted our characters to have grown up in the same neighborhood, which would have been unusual in 1939. Our story thus began in Boyle Heights, which was one of the few areas in L.A. that did not have racially restrictive housing covenants intended to bar people of color from buying property in largely white neighborhoods. The jinxed couple that sang the first duet lived next door to each other: Lew Zellman, an aspiring Apollo engineer, and Susan Tanaka, a budding painter. Today they might have led a charmed life. But interracial marriage was illegal in California until 1948. Worse, when the U.S. entered World War II, Susan was sent to a relocation camp, where–like real-life Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa–she learned to draw from the Disney animators interned with her. The other main characters were Oscar Gutierrez, a jazz instrumentalist, and Shirley Norman, an African-American journalist hired by the real-life Charlotta Bass, who ran The California Eagle from 1912 until she was pressured to sell it in 1951.

Laura and I put a lot of our fathers into Lew Zellman. Her dad–now a cardiologist in Beverly Hills–grew up in the close-knit Jewish community in Boyle Heights. My dad the rocket engineer lived for the space race.

I made Susan Tanaka my kindred spirit. After her internment, she lives all over the world, gaining recognition as an artist. But her strongest works draw upon memories of her West Coast childhood. “On the other side of the planet / I drew the neighborhood
 I couldn’t wait to leave” she reflects in a bittersweet aria set 30 years after her love duet.

Like Susan, I fled my native Southern California for college and a job on the East Coast. But the subject matter of my two best-known books–Forever Barbie and Astro Turf–pulled me back. In the late 1990s, I moved back here from Manhattan to research the book about JPL. I didn’t plan to stay. But the city captivated me. It was so different from Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. What had once seemed an entertainment industry ghetto was now a hub of art and culture–home to important museums, revolutionary architecture, and a major opera company. The city’s ethos had evolved. Like the freeway, L.A. was ever-changing, molded by time’s river into a bold new metropolis. Most astonishing, downtown, which had largely been abandoned in the 1960s, was becoming vital again.

In 2007, I bought a loft there, eager to be part of downtown’s transformation. I live near where the 5 and 10 freeways merge, not far from the Sixth Street Viaduct, a beautiful but structurally unsound bridge over the Los Angeles River. The entire bridge area has been reimagined in a $140 million plan to connect my neighborhood with Boyle Heights and make the riverbank into a landscaped waterway instead of a concrete scar. The project has stirred conflicts over money, land use, and aesthetic vision, with enough drama and heat for another urban opera.

The first community meetings were cacophonous. But as interest groups were forced to coalesce around a single idea, they grew more harmonious. And after years of construction din, auto horns, and the cursing of detoured motorists, the project will culminate in a surprising, mellifluous finale—one that merges L.A.’s present-day car noise with the sounds of its future: pedestrian footfalls (on a special, elevated walkway) and the whir of bikes (in a designated lane).

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