EDITORIAL SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD POLITICS STALLS FINDING ANSWERS TO FREEWAY CONGESTION.

SEVEN years is a long time to spend stuck in traffic - even by Los Angeles standards.

But that's how long Caltrans officials say it's going to take to complete the desperately needed improvements under way on the 101-405 interchange - ranked the sixth worst bottleneck in the country.

The busy interchange suffers from that same affliction that imperils the rest of the state: a lack of planning, forethought and concern among local and state political leaders.

Working at speeds worthy of the 405 or 101 at rush hour, Caltrans says it won't complete the key fixes to the northbound 405 transition road until 2008 - and that's assuming no major delays. With a regulatory bump in the road or two, it could take until 2009 or 2010.

And even then, commuters won't actually get any relief.

The Southern California Agency of Governments predicts traffic in L.A. County to expand by 40 percent between now and 2025. That means that, if we're lucky, the modest improvements that Caltrans is slowly making to the 405-101 interchange will just keep up with the rise in traffic.

After seven or more years of waiting, the 500,000 commuters whose engines idle on the interchange each day can expect their commute to be just as long and arduous as it is now.

Yippee.

The gears of government grind slowly.

The 101-405 logjam isn't anything new. The interchange was built in 1956 to accommodate 200,000 cars a day. Congestion has worsened steadily for the last 4 1/2 decades, while political leadership has simply ignored the problem and allowed it to mount.

It took a 1997 Daily News series identifying the 101-405 interchange as ground zero for gridlock in the Valley to attract any political attention to the bottleneck, and even then it took another three years for the work to get started.

This is how business is done in California.

Politicians are more interested in politics than governance. Only at the last minute do they start paying attention. They then scramble to clean up what had once been a wholly foreseeable and preventable problem.

Take power. Sacramento could have dealt swiftly with the energy shortage last year, but it dawdled, and now we're faced with a full-blown crisis.

Similar crises in water supply, transportation, housing and health care await, but don't expect the politicians to start addressing them until it's all but too late.

The silver lining is that the public is slowly wising up to its elected officials' malfeasance. A new survey from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that a plurality of Californians think the state is headed in the wrong direction.

That number will continue to rise until local and state politicians start doing their jobs - or the public votes to take their jobs away.