ROAD BLOCKS; CITY PLANNERS FORGOT TRAFFIC IN ADDING NIFTY NEW ARTS VENUES.

Byline: Peter Bunzel

OUR city fathers must have lost their minds. In their collective folly, they have enthusiastically laid plans for our sprawling megalopolis that would inevitably cause gridlock in our attempts to reach downtown, defeating the very purpose of those plans.The other evening my wife and I had tickets for Ibsen's ``An Enemy of the People'' at the Ahmanson (capacity: 2,048). Our plan was to meet another couple there and have a leisurely sandwich beforehand at one of the outdoor tables provided for that purpose. Since the Dodgers were playing that night on their home field (capacity: 56,000), I estimated that instead of allowing the usual 45 minutes, we should expect to spend a full hour on the road.

Foolish me.

The freeway was so slow that we barely arrived in time to wolf down our sandwiches before catching Sir Ian McKellan's first entrance. Compounding the congestion was the traffic bound for the Mark Taper Forum (capacity: 750) and, especially, the Hollywood Bowl (capacity: 18,000). But consider how much longer it would have taken us to reach downtown - two hours? three hours? - if the city fathers' dreams had already come true.

Those dreams include the Walt Disney Concert Hall (capacity: 2,350) and the Staples Arena (capacity: somewhere around 20,000, depending on the event). Neither of these will supplant an existing structure; indeed, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (capacity: 3,200), upon being vacated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will become available not only for opera but for visiting ballet companies and other musical events.

Fine, but will audiences ever reach their seats on time?

Five freeways converge downtown, each overworked. Even without the lure of those new edifices, traffic congestion is bound to worsen because of population growth, as it has repeatedly since World War II. More than 600,000 new residents are predicted for Los Angeles in the next decade. No surcease is in sight.

Subway construction is stalled, if not permanently sidetracked. The bus system is a sick joke. Freeway planners originally envisioned a 1,379-mile system, which was ultimately pared down to just 615 miles. Nowadays, you can't tell much difference between our freeways during off hours and rush hours. The interchange of the Ventura and San Diego freeways opened in 1962 for an expected daily onslaught of 90,000 vehicles, but today averages 536,500 - and is still climbing.

Consider the night a decade ago when true gridlock struck the city. The cause was a terrible accident at that very interchange. The whole city came to a virtual standstill; there were no alternate routes. I remember it well because that night we held tickets for Lily Tomlin's one-woman show in Hollywood, of which we saw only the second half.

For contrast, let's take Manhattan. Its streets are jammed with vehicular traffic in the daytime, but not at night. Subways, buses and taxis provide fast service for Broadway, Lincoln Center and other venues. As for culture vultures and sports fans from outlying areas, they come by the trainload from New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut. There, good transportation made it feasible to centralize the city's main attractions.

Here our transportation network is demonstrably in crisis. I first moved to Los Angeles in 1957 as a reporter for Life magazine, which put us up for two storybook weeks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (On our arrival, a dozen beauty contestants were strutting their stuff in the lobby - hello, Los Angeles!) The next night we were invited out to dinner in South Pasadena. Once we entered the Pasadena Freeway, our hostess advised us, stay in the right lane, because traffic moved so fast we might miss our exit.

How would that conversation go today? Maybe: ``Find the fastest lane and then shift lanes as you choose - everybody does. Don't worry about missing your exit. You'll be going about 12 miles an hour anyway. No problem.''

No problem - that seems to be the official consensus. Our movers and shakers (elected, appointed and self-appointed) have kept mum about the massive tie-ups that the new downtown attractions will spawn. Not long ago the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial called ``With Vision, a New Downtown.'' It drooled over the prospect of having ``a `real' downtown again'' - again? - ``that attracts upscale shoppers and an after-hours dinner and theater crowd.'' No mention whatsoever - not even a hint - of how traffic snarls could doom this dream when thousands of additional cars clog the freeways, all of them headed for downtown or nearby venues at approximately the same time.

By remaining silent, let alone taking action, our city leaders are evading their responsibility. Unless something is done to alleviate the problem, our newfound palaces of culture and sports will play to diminished and distraught audiences. Count me among them.

Suppose, a few years down the pike, ``An Enemy of the People'' makes a return visit, and suppose I'm lucky enough to have tickets. Here's my prophecy: I'll get strangulated in traffic where the Ventura Freeway meets the San Diego Freeway or maybe the Harbor Freeway. In which case, I'll miss not just Sir Ian McKellan's entrance but also much of Ibsen's searing drama.

The real enemy of the people will be those city officials and civic boosters who got us into this jam to begin with.

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Drawing: (Color) ROAD BLOCKS

Rick Nease/Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service