Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
When the DOT suggested installing “smart” devices that would sense the presence of a pedestrian at a crosswalk and activate a flashing signal, it was gently rebuffed by the Rabbinical Council of California, which opined that activating the light via a signal, even if it was done passively, violated the Sabbath restrictions. If pedestrians were
unaware
that their presence was triggering the device, the council noted, the smart device would be acceptable, but “people would quickly realize its presence and avoid using the crosswalk on the Sabbath.”
These nuances pale before the overwhelming fact that Los Angeles is handling more traffic now than was ever thought possible. “A lot of major streets, like La Cienega and La Brea, carry sixty thousand vehicles a day,” says Fisher. “Those streets were designed to carry thirty thousand vehicles a day.” Years ago, engineers used capacity-expanding tricks like reversible lanes on Wilshire Boulevard and other major thoroughfares, changing the normal direction of one lane to help carry traffic in from the freeway in the morning and send it back out in the evening. That is no longer possible. “When you’re getting a split like sixty-five percent of traffic one way, thirty-five percent the other way, reversible lanes work very well,” Fisher says. “Today we rarely have that type of peaking anywhere in the city.” The highways are no different. The San Diego Freeway, or I-405, was projected to carry 160,000 vehicles when it was completed at the end of the 1960s. It now carries almost 400,000 per day, and the junction where it connects to the Santa Monica Freeway is the most congested in the United States. The Santa Monica used to be a traditional sort of urban highway, with a heavier morning peak toward downtown and the reverse in the afternoon. “You try to go outbound in the morning and that often seems heavier than the inbound is,” Fisher says.
“We used to have typical days where we would give volumes,” notes Dawn Helou, an engineer with Caltrans, the sprawling and omnipresent agency in charge of California’s highways. “A typical day is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in a month preferably without holidays, in a week preferably without holidays. No rain, no holidays, no summer vacation, no incidents. We’re running out of those typical days.”
The thing that keeps the whole system from breaking down is precisely that advantage that humans have over ants: the ability to see, and direct, the whole traffic system at once. By making all these decisions for the drivers, by coordinating the complex ballet of wants and needs, supply and demand at intersections, engineers have been able to improve the city’s traffic flow. A study a few years ago by the DOT showed that the area containing real-time traffic signals reduced travel times by nearly 13 percent, increased travel speeds by 12 percent, reduced delay by 21 percent, and cut the number of stops by 31 percent. Just by quickly alerting the DOT that signals have malfunctioned, the system squeezes out more efficiency. What the traffic engineers have done is added “virtual” capacity to a city that cannot add any more lanes to its streets.
The flow of information is crucial to maintaining the flow of traffic. With no spare capacity, irregularities in the system need to be diagnosed and addressed as soon as possible. Engineers at Caltrans say that as a rule of thumb, for every one minute a highway lane is blocked, an additional four to five minutes of delay are generated. The inductor loops buried in the highway can and do detect changes in the traffic patterns. But the highway loops are not in real time. There can be a gap of anywhere from a few minutes to a quarter of an hour before the information they’re recording is processed. Often, visual confirmation by camera is needed to verify that there is a problem. In that time, a huge jam could develop. Or sometimes the loops in a particular section of highway are not working (Caltrans reports anywhere from 65 to 75 percent of its twenty-eight thousand statewide loops are working on a given day), or a section of highway will have no loops at all.
This is why, each day in Los Angeles, there is a frantic search for the truth. It’s called the traffic report. Traffic news is the sound track of daily life in Los Angeles, a subliminal refrain of “Sig Alerts” and “overturned big rigs” always on the edge of one’s consciousness. Occasionally the story is that there is no story, according to Vera Jimenez, who does the morning traffic on KCAL, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles. “Sometimes it’s funny,” she said one morning at the Caltrans building. “The story is not that the traffic’s really heavy, but, oh my gosh, it’s surprisingly light. It’s not a holiday, there isn’t anything going on, it’s just really light. Everyone’s driving the way they should, everyone’s merging, and believe it or not, look how nice it is.”
No city in the world has more traffic reports or traffic reporters than Los Angeles, and to spend time with them is to see the city, and traffic, in a new way. Early one morning, I drive to Tustin, an Orange County suburb that is home to Airwatch, a Clear Channel subsidiary and one of America’s largest traffic-reporting services. In a room filled with banks of televisions, computer monitors, and police scanners, Chris Hughes is several hours into the morning rush hour. Armed with a stopwatch and jittery from caffeine, Hughes rattles off a fast, well-calibrated, flow: “Heavy traffic in Long Beach this morning on the North 405 through Woodruff to the 710 then again from the 110 Freeway heading up to Inglewood…”
For each of the different radio stations for which Hughes reports, he must change the length of his report, as well as the way he says it. One station wants “upbeat and conversational,” while another wants a precise robotlike diction they call “traffic formatics.” Some stations have advertisements for Hooters Casino, but the Christian stations do not. Some stations actually want him to be someone else. “
Good
morning, I’m Jason Kennedy with AM 1150 traffic brought to you by Air New Zealand,” I suddenly hear him say. “They’re sort of competing stations,” he explains sheepishly, “even though we own them both.”
Hughes has an instinctual understanding of Los Angeles’ highways. He can tell which way a rainstorm is moving by looking at the real-time traffic-flow highway maps. He knows Fridays heading east out of the city can be particularly bad. “Everyone’s going to Las Vegas—all the way to ten p.m. that’ll be backed up.” He knows that people drive slower on highway stretches that have sound barriers to either side. He knows that mornings with heavy rains often lead to lighter afternoon traffic. “Maybe a lot of people got scared of the rain and disappeared,” he says. He notes that while traffic information is easily available to the public, often the trick is in understanding it. “It’s kind of like
The Matrix,
” he says. “You’re looking at the map and you can pick out what looks right and what doesn’t. I can look at the map now and say, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong on the 101. A big-rig fire at Highland, probably.’”
There is no limit to the things that can disrupt the flow on Los Angeles highways. “Do you want to know the number one specific item dropped on the freeway?” asks Claire Sigman, another Airwatch reporter. “The most recorded item is ladders.” Trucks, just like in the
Beverly Hills Cop
movies, also spill avocados and oranges. Portable toilets have been dumped in the middle of the freeway. In 2007, a house, replete with graffiti and a “For Rent” sign, sat for weeks on the Hollywood Freeway, abandoned during the course of its move after it struck an overpass (the owner had taken a detour onto an unauthorized route). People hold apocalyptic signs on overpasses, or threaten to jump. Wildfires break out. Out in the high desert, tumbleweeds cause problems. “People swerve out of the way, rather than just drive through it,” Hughes says. A computer screen at the Airwatch office ticks off a steady flow of traffic incidents, ranging from the absurd to the horrifying, as recorded by the California Highway Patrol (CHP). Codes are used to disguise the presence of stalled female drivers, who might otherwise be preyed upon by unsavory men listening to police scanners. Not atypical of the stream is incident 0550, which describes a “WMA,” or white male, wearing a plaid jacket and “peeing in middle of fwy.” It adds a noteworthy detail: “No veh in sight.” (Now, where was that wayward Porta Potti?)
CHP officers are the foot soldiers in the daily battle to keep Los Angeles’ traffic from collapsing. The sophisticated computer modeling and fiber-optic cable that the traffic generals in the bunker have at their disposal are of little use when a car has stalled on Interstate 5, as I learned one afternoon when I went out for a patrol in a CHP cruiser with Sergeant Joe Zizi, an easygoing former trooper now doing public relations. CHP patrol officers begin each day by “cleaning their beat,” or removing any abandoned vehicles or hazards from the road. “That way there’s nothing that people have to look at when they’re driving,” Zizi says as he drives along the 101. Something as simple as a couch dumped in a roadside ditch can send minor shudders of curiosity through the traffic flow. A standard-issue black pump-action shotgun sits between the front seats. To enable drivers to carry out their traffic triage duties, patrol cars are outfitted with reinforced bumpers, designed to let them push cars off the road rather than wait for a tow truck. Their trunks are filled with a dizzying array of equipment for dealing with traffic contingencies, ranging from baby-delivering kits (“definitely a spectacle for rubberneckers”) to dog snares.
“For some reason, dogs are attracted to the freeway,” says Zizi. “They get on there, get completely freaked out, and start running down the center.” According to CHP statistics, these Code 1125-As (traffic hazard—animal) peak on July 5, presumably from dogs scared by the previous night’s fireworks. When traffic is moving, CHP officers pass the time by looking for stolen vehicles (screwdrivers in the ignition are a telltale sign) and, of course, writing traffic tickets. Does Zizi have any advice for beating tickets? “I have a lot of officers who say that women crying will get them out of tickets, while other officers say that if someone
does
cry they’re getting the ticket,” he says. “Of course we have a lot of men who cry trying to get out of tickets, but that really doesn’t work on the heartstrings of officers.”
For all the Caltrans cameras and loops wired into the road, for all the CHP officers flagging incidents, the highway system running through Los Angeles is so vast and incomprehensible that, sometimes, the only way to really understand what’s happening is to pull way back and view the whole system from above. That is why there is still a place for people like Mike Nolan, KFI’s “eye in the sky,” a longtime L.A. traffic reporter who, twice daily, will take off in his Cessna 182 from Riverside County’s Corona Airport and cover a swath of ground from Pasadena to Orange County.
“The learning curve is being able to read a freeway,” he explains, banking his plane over a new subdivision carved into green hillside. “I know what’s normal. I know where it should be slowing down and where it shouldn’t. When I see something out of the ordinary, then I investigate it.” Nolan, whose navigational mantra is “Keep the freeway to your left,” knows traffic patterns like a grizzled fishing guide knows the best bass holes. A stalled Volkswagen in East Los Angeles is worse than an overturned oil truck in La Cañada (“More spectacular does not necessarily translate into worse,” he says). Mondays, especially during
Monday Night Football,
tend to be a bit lighter. Thursday, congestion-wise, is now looking like the new Friday, traditionally the busy “getaway day.” There are also strange blips in the pattern, like sunrise slowdowns. “The very first day of standard time, when we go from daylight saving time to darkness, everybody just locks up,” he says. “The traffic goes from bad to horrendous.” Rainy days can be bad, but the first rainy day in a while is even worse. “There’s a buildup of oil and rubber if it hasn’t rained in a while. It’s like driving on ice, literally.”
Nolan says people have long been predicting, because of ground sensors and in-vehicle probes that can detect the speed of traffic, that there will no longer be a need for aerial traffic reports. Indeed, on his instrument panel he has attached a TrafficGauge, a Palm Pilot–sized device fed by Caltrans data, that shows congestion levels on L.A. freeways. But he says that data rarely tell the whole story, or the correct story. “In my mind there’s no substitute for looking out the window and telling people what you’ve got,” he says. “The sensors in the road are delayed, they’re inefficient. They’re working half the time, not working half the time. There’s no substitute for saying, ‘It’s in the right lane, I see it right there, right at the fill-in-the-blank overpass.’ Or that the tow truck is in heavy traffic. The sensor can’t tell you the tow truck’s a block away, or ready to hook up and pull away. It can’t give you the substantive info that comes from looking at it directly.”
Indeed, that afternoon of flying around the city, accompanied by an Airwatch reporter receiving ground reports, seems to be an exercise in chasing ghosts. The jackknifed tractor-trailer on the 710 is not there, or never was there. The blockage on the 405 was a rumor. Nolan is the one who must try to make sense of the strange reports that come in, like the one that announced a dead dog was “blocking lanes one, two, three, and four.” The most remarkable traffic event he ever saw was during the L.A. riots of 1992. “I remember seeing people stop at a stoplight in Hollywood. They would get out and loot a store. The light would turn green and they’d get back in and drive away. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
Flying over a city like Los Angeles, it is easy to glance down and think, for a moment, that the people below, streaming along trails, look like ants. If only it were that simple.
You hit the brakes for a second, just tap them on the freeway, you can literally track the ripple effect of that action across a two-hundred-mile stretch of road, because traffic has a memory. It’s amazing. It’s like a living organism.
—
Mission: Impossible III