L.A. stingy with advanced traffic information.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation, which last week reported traffic volume on major arteries had jumped 4.4 percent due to the transit strike, has refused to sell data from its state-of-the-art traffic center that could be used by motorists.

The rebuff is part of the department's longstanding resistance to have any of its properties, including its DASH and Commuter Express buses, associated with advertising that presumably would appear on Web sites and other platforms displaying the data.

"Our concern is being involved with something controversial if we allow a private entity to display our information," said John Fisher, assistant general manager at L.A. DOT. "We want to preserve the dignity of the product we have.

"We don't want them to show information such as a controversial political ad or something that might be perceived as profane," he said.

The DOT has reams of up-to-the-minute traffic data that are available free to the public on its Web site (trafficinfo.lacity.org). Its main citywide map, updated every two minutes, offers an overview of the major thoroughfares and more detailed looks at 18 traffic submarkets. The site color codes the speed of traffic on city streets--red for 0-10 mph, yellow for 10-20 and green for faster than 20 mph--and links to a non-city site for freeway information. As a result, the site is the sole source of immediate public access to the traffic data.

But access to such information is limited at best. Several companies are selling services that could include traffic information, if they had access to the city's database.

But James Lefton, chief of transit programs at the DOT, said selling that data was a secondary concern to the department. "We are careful about our brand name," he said. "The purpose of transportation is to move people, not to provide billboards."

The city, facing a budget shortfall of tens of millions of dollars in the coming fiscal year, does monetize some of its transportation-related assets.

The Bureau of Street Services, responsible for bus stop kiosks and street benches, allows the sale of advertising on those assets.

Officials of the Bureau of Street Services did not return calls seeking comment, but Lefton, who said he did not have specific figures, called the bureau's deals to allow those ads a "significant revenue generator for the city."

"There's not the same feeling about the brand name as with the buses," he said.

Frustration mounts

The resistance has frustrated firms that have sought to strike deals with the DOT.

Travel Advisory News Network, a Diamond Bar firm serving television and radio stations, has approached the city several times over the past four years about licensing its traffic information.

TANN offered the DOT a revenue-sharing deal, but city officials balked because of the company's reliance on advertising, said John Cox, its president.

Besides the advertising issue, Cox believes the city's inability to understand the economics of the private sector was a problem. "It's mind-boggling why they don't want the public to have it, and it's a missed revenue chance," he said.

The most recent approach has come from Pharos Science & Applications Inc.

The Torrance-based developer of navigation applications for mobile devices offers a $395 per month service that gives consumers with handheld computers wireless access to live freeway traffic conditions in 50 cities nationwide. Its data for Los Angeles comes gratis from the California Department of Transportation and is limited to the state freeway system.

The company offers routing recommendations as part of the service and wants to use the city's local traffic information to augment what it receives from Caltrans. But Pharos President James Oyang said the city has so far ignored its requests to negotiate.

"I don't know the top guy to talk to. The problem in not having this is we can end up routing someone to a worse area that has even worse traffic," he said.

Oyang said the city was wasting an opportunity to better utilize a valuable, largely tax-funded resource he believes should be shared with the public at no charge. "L.A. has the most advanced information in the country. The residents have paid taxes to develop the information so that's the benefit they should get," he said.

Fisher said he was not aware of Pharos but expressed concerns over the idea. He did not discount the possibility of monetizing the DOT data, but said that in order for it to happen the company must "add value to it."

Other cities lead

The DOT system uses street sensors, video cameras and timed traffic lights in conjunction with centralized computers to autonomously manage traffic. After a brief period in the late 1990s where it provided the information to a now defunct L.A. entertainment Web site, the city drafted a policy against the open use of the information commercially.

Now, the main page of its Web site is explicit in its desire to retain control of the data.

"No entity, public, private, or a combination thereof shall redistribute, enhance, repackage, frame or add value to this Web Site without a prior written agreement with the City of Los Angeles," it says.

Cox said L.A. was one of the few cities with the combination of traffic congestion and monitoring technology that made monetizing the local traffic system worthwhile.

In the late 1990s, he managed a federal government sponsored experiment aiming to test the validity of such as system in Orange County. The Orange County Transportation Authority created a Web site that displayed traffic on major streets but lack of public demand eventually led to the cancellation of the project.

"The key is government effort. There is someone willing to pay for this," said Cox, who said other cities had struck deals to sell highway traffic information.