Keep Los Angeles Rolling

Staying in Los Angeles on a holiday weekend offers a rare chance to sample the city that its streets and freeways were built for. You can breeze from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside so quickly you might think you’d drifted back 40 years.

Traffic zips along even at the infamously congested junction of the San Diego and Ventura freeways--at least until the holiday horde begins inching back to the city like an elephant through a python. That jolt from free flow to near standstill dramatizes how utterly Los Angeles’ transportation infrastructure has failed to keep up with its growing population.

The San Diego-Ventura interchange is a prime example. Built in 1956 to handle 200,000 cars a day, now 551,000 squeeze through on most days. No wonder they creep long.

Earlier this year the California Transportation Department began building an extra lane on the northbound San Diego Freeway from Mulholland Drive to the Greenleaf Street offramp, the first of three planned improvements. But transit officials, mindful of the huge cost and disruption that would be involved in tearing down the outdated interchange and starting over, admit they are just applying a $50-million Band-Aid that, at best, will give temporary relief before the new lanes fill with new motorists slowing to a crawl.

There are alternatives worse than crawling. Coming to a stop is one. If Los Angeles wants to avoid that, it will have to supplement these incremental improvements with others to relieve congestion not just on freeways but on city streets.

The candidates in the June 5 mayoral runoff agree more than they disagree on public transportation policies. James K. Hahn wants to speed up street traffic by installing more left-turn lanes, ending street parking on major thoroughfares and banning street construction during peak commuting hours. Antonio Villaraigosa wants to add hundreds of new buses, slash fares and offer free rides if a bus is more than 10 minutes late. Both support an Exposition Boulevard light-rail line from Santa Monica to USC. A recent study projects ridership levels to and from the densely populated Westside comparable to the Blue Line’s and greater than the Green Line’s. An enthusiastic new mayor, with four appointees to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, could give the project a welcome push.

We say do it all--and throw in defeated primary candidate Steve Soboroff’s proposal for reversible one-way streets. Then make sure these ideas get funded and done.

Adding left-turn lanes, buses and even the Exposition line doesn’t amount to a grand transportation plan, true. But here in Los Angeles, big plans, like the truncated Red Line subway, tend to run out of money and public patience. Plan away, but while politicians and residents argue the merits of light rail versus subways versus busways (always in someone else’s neighborhood), at least make sure the little things get done. No, we can’t go back to the city of 40 years ago, but we can work to keep commutes from stealing ever more time. At stake is the very notion of Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa and Hahn have adopted primary candidate Kathleen Connell’s idea of organizing neighborhood festivals as an antidote to the city’s balkanization. It’s a good idea. But first we have to--literally--get there.