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MOBILITY IN
LOS ANGELES
COUNTY
Prepared by
the LAEDC
Summer 2001
What Could
Have Been...
Highway
Transportation Agency’s plans for
L.A.’s freeways, 1965
What We
Have Now...
An incomplete
freeway system with gaps and limited coverage
“Have you heard? They’re building a dedicated
car lane on the 710.”
“What’s the
difference between the 405 Freeway and a parking lot? On the 405 you get
to park for free.”
As these
jokes reveal,
Los Angeles
and the
Inland Empire are afflicted with some of the worst
traffic in the nation. Congestion is already bad– time lost to traffic
delays costs the average
L.A.
driver $1,500 or
more annually – and the situation promises to worsen before it improves.
The five-county population is projected to rise,
2000-2025, from
17 to
23 million, adding the equivalent of the current
population of the Cities of Los
Angeles plus San
Diego. The new residents will add more than two million
additional cars to our already congested freeway system.
Few, if any, new
freeways are likely to be built. Indeed, most future freeways
expenditures are expected to be consumed by maintenance and marginal
improvements such as adding lanes and improving onramps, so traffic will
surely slow to a crawl. Some residents have adjusted by moving closer to
work or changing jobs: a 1999 Southern California Association of
Governments(SCAG) study revealed that within the previous two
years, 17% of respondents who had moved and 22%
of those who had changed jobs did so for commute related
reasons. If the region is to maintain its quality of life and economic
competitiveness, however, we will need a comprehensive solution to our
mobility woes.
Any feasible
solution must acknowledge reality: Southern
California is famously dependent on the automobile.
However, environmental and budgetary limitations mean that simply
building more freeways is out of the question. Even expanding existing
routes is made problematic, if not impossible, by the urban development
that hems inmost Southern California
freeways. We could expand skywards – by adding a second level
to some of our busiest freeways – but such a solution would be
prohibitively expensive and jeopardize thirty years of gains in regional
air quality. Therefore, our focus in this report is on using our
freeways more efficiently, and on transportation alternatives that
lessen our dependence on the freeways.
Read the details of
the expansive study
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