TRAFFIC: WHAT CAN L.A. DO ABOUT IT? SUGGESTIONS INCLUDE TOLL LANES, MORE BUSES.Byline: Michael Coit Daily News Staff Writer Dear Gridlock Gridlock A government, business or institution's inability to function at a normal level due either to complex or conflicting procedures within the administrative framework or to impending change in the business. Sam: ``Why does Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. have the worst traffic in the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , and what can be done about it?'' Gridlock Sam: ``You hold a reign that the Chicago Bulls The Chicago Bulls are a professional basketball team based in Chicago, Illinois. They play in the National Basketball Association. The team was founded in 1966, and has won six NBA Championships since. would be proud of. Most people in L.A. live This article or section contains information about expected future buildings or structures. Some or all of this information may be speculative, and the content may change as building construction begins. L.A. behind the wheel. The freeways are very wide, but they're still full. Jams are common there because you have a very high density of cars and lots of potential disturbances because you have a lot of freeway connections.'' ``The larger answer to urban traffic problems is: fewer vehicles. If we believe we can `highway' ourselves out of the problem - we will only buy time out of the problem.'' These words of traffic wisdom come from Sam Schwartz Samuel I. Schwartz, a.k.a. "Gridlock Sam," is one of the leading transportation engineers in the United States, and is widely believed to be the man responsible for popularizing the phrase gridlock. He originally worked as a cabbie. , a former New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. traffic commissioner who coined the word ``gridlock'' and is known in his newspaper column as Gridlock Sam. He and his physicist brother, Brian, make their living studying the wheres and whys of traffic, using the freeways of Los Angeles and New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of as their laboratories. They see one critical solution for L.A.'s infamous traffic: GET PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR CARS! The brothers also suggest that Los Angeles should improve its bus system to draw more commuters and place high-occupancy toll A high-occupancy toll (HOT) is a toll enacted on single-occupant vehicles who wish to use lanes or entire roads that are designated for the use of high-occupancy vehicles (HOVs, also known as carpools). lanes on freeways to charge motorists for a congestion The condition of a network when there is not enough bandwidth to support the current traffic load. congestion - When the offered load of a data communication path exceeds the capacity. alternative. Still, the brothers Schwartz are only cautiously optimistic. They recognize this is the land of cars. ``Motorists still have the Wild West spirit, and the car is equivalent to the horse, and nobody's going to mess with mess with Verb Informal, chiefly US to interfere in, or become involved with, a dangerous person, thing, or situation: he had started messing with drugs my horse,'' Sam Schwartz said. Brian Schwartz, a Brooklyn College Brooklyn College: see New York, City University of. physics professor, believes that building more lanes will bring bigger traffic jams. With freeways more jammed than free-flowing anymore, he said Los Angeles is leading the way in the nation's increasing immobility. Motorists will be forced to find alternatives. ``People have many different solutions. They may decide to work at home, they may decide to car pool, they may decide to tackle public transportation, they may move. Now, when you open another lane, they go back,'' he said. The science of traffic Like a river carrying a certain volume of water, freeways are designed to carry a limited number of vehicles, some 2,000 cars per lane per hour at best. They flow smoothly when there's plenty of room and slow down and become turbulent when there is an obstruction - wrecks, roadwork road·work n. 1. Sports Outdoor long-distance running as a form of physical exercise or conditioning. 2. The activity of taking a band, typically a rock band, on extended tours. 3. Highway construction. and merging traffic. ``As traffic becomes more dense, what can happen is now the interaction increases where you can go from a liquid flowing to a solid. No two atoms can be in the same place at the same time. No two cars can be in the same place at the same time,'' said Brian Schwartz, a consultant to the American Physical Society The American Physical Society was founded in 1899 and is the world's second largest organization of physicists. The Society publishes more than a dozen science journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than twenty science . ``If there are a lot of cars, just by the period of time and interaction, when one car slows down, it causes the car behind it to slow down and it slows down a little more subtly and the one behind it slows even a little more subtly. Ultimately, it propagates a traffic jam,'' he said. ``The little disturbance gets amplified.'' Get ready for more disturbances, the brothers predict. The population in Southern California Southern California, also colloquially known as SoCal, is the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. Centered on the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego, Southern California is home to nearly 24 million people and is the nation's second most populated region, is expected to rise by 43 percent, as compared with an 11 percent increase in freeway lanes through 2020, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. the Southern California Association of Governments' most recent regional transportation plan. ``We're already one of the largest industrial areas in the metropolitan world and one of the most spacious areas,'' said Bob Huddy, a veteran transportation planner with SCAG scag - To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the file system or by causing media damage. Compare scrog, roach. . ``There are not many one-size-fits-all solutions.'' Toll roads The following is a list of toll roads. Toll roads are roads on which a toll authority collects a fee for use. This list also contains toll bridges and toll tunnels. Lists of these subsets of toll roads can be found in List of toll bridges and List of toll tunnels. Transportation planners from the Reason Public Policy Institute have endorsed the idea of high-occupancy toll lanes as one of the best solutions to traffic problems in Los Angeles. A SCAG-sponsored task force found the lanes made sense as a type of congestion pricing. Sam Schwartz agrees. As a former New York City traffic commissioner, he is accustomed to pushing unpopular ideas that favor public transit and vehicles carrying more than the driver, or putting a price on time-saving routes. Charging motorists for driving in Manhattan was a particularly controversial proposal in the mid-1980s. ``I nearly got tarred and feathered,'' he said. Yet some toll routes started around construction projects remain today in New York Today in New York is WNBC-TV's pre-Today newscast, also post-Today on weekends, airing from 5 AM to 7 AM weekdays with the local news cut ins being branded as such. . ``The real beauty of it is you can guarantee people reliability in traffic, which is unheard of,'' Schwartz said. High-occupancy toll lanes would be expensive enough to keep down demand so they don't become overloaded and lose the time-saving advantage. The lanes also carry car pools, van pools and buses. ``I like nothing better than watching people in transit smiling at people stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic,'' Schwartz said. Creating dedicated bus lanes also would do much to ease traffic. ``Now I don't think it would be welcomed in L.A., but I have often taken lanes away from general traffic and given it to public transit,'' he said. Maybe motorists can be needled into changing solo-driving habits. That was one of Schwartz's techniques as traffic commissioner. He recalled posting a sign where traffic jammed on an elevated highway connecting Manhattan and Staten Island that read: ``Wouldn't you rather be riding the ferry now?'' Car-pool lane critic Southern Californians who question the value of car-pool lanes will find an ally in Sam Schwartz. ``I have yet to find a car-pool lane that achieves its goal to have fewer vehicles overall,'' he contended. New technology has arrived that could cut commute times, including a computer system that reroutes motorists. ``In the future, your car is going to have something that sends out a signal to a satellite and the satellite will be able to see how fast cars are going everywhere, and your dashboard will recommend different things to different cars,'' Brian Schwartz explained. Federally funded studies are attempting to develop computer simulations that mimic traffic. Schwartz prefers the practical, explaining his 19-year rise from counting cars to first deputy commissioner for the New York City transportation department. ``My job is to translate between the esoteric scientists and the lay people,'' Schwartz explained. ``When I went to a party and said I was a physicist, they would yawn. When I said I was the traffic commissioner, they would line up,'' he recalled. ``Everyone's a traffic expert.'' Gripping gridlock Gridlock is an example of the theoretical translated to the practical. Schwartz's mathematical definition for gridlock shows vehicle speeds decline with more vehicles in motion, ultimately reaching zero. The term came before the theory. He and a colleague were studying the prospect of converting Manhattan streets to pedestrian malls. ``We talked about the grid system locking up.'' The term, though, didn't gain notice until Schwartz launched a gridlock prevention program to prepare for a transit strike in the mid-1980s. Notable wordsmith word·smith n. 1. A fluent and prolific writer, especially one who writes professionally. 2. An expert on words. Noun 1. William Safire of the New York Times wrote in April 1980, ``Such a word cannot miss. Gridlock is a fine neologism A new word or new meaning for an existing word. The high-tech field routinely creates neologisms, especially new meanings. Years ago, there was no doubt that a "mouse" referred only to a furry, little rodent. for the automobile Armageddon. Gridlock is to highway engineers what nuclear meltdown is to nuclear engineers.'' Gridlock did give a definition the Schwartz brothers figure might literally become true in many urban areas - total paralysis of traffic. Whatever alternatives Los Angeles finally chooses, the Schwartz brothers say they will be watching the freeways - and learning. ``You have more of them, and I think it gives L.A. its character,'' Sam Schwartz said. ``If you're studying traffic nationally or internationally, you will make a stop in L.A. and you will make a stop in New York.'' How to keep traffic moving What some call driver courtesy, veteran transportation planner Bob Huddy says are practices that can keep traffic moving smoothly and ward off traffic jams. ``I think road courtesy is really underestimated,'' he said. ``Motorists see themselves five cars ahead, they don't see imposing a 30-second delay on everyone behind them.'' Here are some tips for what you can do to ease congestion: Keep a steady pace and speed and a safe distance. Don't use merge lanes to pass. Don't move back and forth between lanes. Leave earlier on trips. Plan for road problems. Don't use freeways for short trips. CAPTION(S): photo, drawing, box Box: How to keep traffic moving (see text) Drawing: The science of congestion Traffic resembles the rules of physics, as illustrated by the progression of traffic from freely flowing to jammed. Research Michael Coit, graphics Dionisio Munoz/Daily News Photo: (color) no caption (freeway traffic) |
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