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Want Traffic Solutions? Think Outside the Box |
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Traffic Crisis
By Roy Reynolds
(Editor’s note: Councilwoman Wendy Greuel is Chair of the Transportation committee. Next Tuesday, the City Council agenda will be devoted to a single topic: Transportation.
 A few weeks ago, CityWatch published a piece by Councilwoman Greuel saying she was shocked that LA had no transportation vision and asked for feedback from the public. What follows is most of the ‘feedback’ letter sent to Ms Greuel by Roy Reynolds, the Managing Director of PRT Strategies. We publish it because we think that no idea should be left unconsidered as Councilwoman Greuel and the city attempt to resolve one of LA’s most important issues.)
Per your request for feedback on Los Angeles’ City Transportation Plan, we offer the following and wish to share the enclosed material for your Committee to review this new mode of transit technology.
• Historically, the City has pursued only conventional solutions to traffic and transit – obviously, MTA provides bus and light/commuter/heavy rail alternatives, but only three percent of local commuting is now handled by public transit. We dislike the cliché, but Los Angeles has never thought “outside the box” to resolve traffic congestion.
• Los Angeles has over 400 miles of underutilized flood control and river channels. Parochial resistance has prevented the use of these natural right-of-ways for certain transit systems which might effectively make use of them with minimal community impact. Monorail has been proposed for these RoWs, but this unremarkable and inflexible technology is simply elevated light rail (with lower capacity) that lacks the crucial capability of being able to switch between its heavy concrete guideways.
• Urban transit is among the last of the transportation technologies to be effectively automated. Computer technology has not been applied to transit to develop the same level of benefit and savings that’s been achieved in automobiles and with air transport.
• Goods movement is generally viewed as an issue ancillary to traffic congestion, yet truck delivery is a significant contributor to congestion and air quality problems.
We know that adding street/freeway capacity isn’t feasible by widening roadway as the lateral space is simply unavailable – and efforts to do so (e.g. new HOV lanes in the 405) are extraordinarily expensive and disruptive. Even more expensive is rail, especially where it must be undergrounded. It’s time to thoughtfully explore elevated transit as it’s less impactful in acquisition of right-of-way and comparatively much less expensive. Put-ting transit just one story above-grade is feasible in most residential and certainly non-residential areas of Los Angeles. Our experience has been that visual impact of elevated systems will be offset by the value, opportunity and lower costs they offer in the urban environment.
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) technology has matured from its first implementa-tions in the 1970s and is ready for wider deploy-ment, possibly as early as 2010. We can best introduce this technology to you via the attached treatment we’d done last month in response to MTA’s request for comments re. the downtown Connector Study. PRT is a reasonable elevated solution for this application, and many others in the City.
It’s time to consider a high-tech solution to LA’s traffic problems. The first phase of your project seeks goals and objectives and it’s time for a new approach – that is, unconventional but achievable solutions, utilization of all available RoWs, computerization and dealing with freight cartage where PRT can be applied.
The first initial impression of PRT is that it cannot deal with heavy passenger volumes. With study and understanding, and simple mathematical projections, PRT can readily match standard bus and rail capacities given 1) that hundreds of vehicles can operate on its trackways with VERY short “headways” – perhaps as minimal as one second separations, and 2) that PRT is NOT a linearly-oriented system – it’s infrastructure is far more useful and flexible if multiple networked paths are built between stations.
PRT stations can also be built INTO structures, acting as second floor in-building portals. This leads us to the potential for public/private partnerships – a currently popular strategy in dealing with large civic expenditures. In this example, the property value of a structure is increased, and PRT becomes appealing to a middle-class demographic when it’s realized that a private and secure ride can be had on demand to/from home or office.
Since PRT operates point-to-point without delay from surface street traffic, commutes are also substantially faster. In PPPs, private sta-tions and even private vehicles can be encouraged. Especially, dual portals could be built, for example, into “big box” retailers, where both passen-gers and freight could be delivered without auto or truck traffic. We emphasized this for the MTA Connector study. (Roy Reynolds is the Managing Director of PRT Strategies, a broker and advocate for Personal Rapid Transit. For more information, including video presentations: www.prtstrategies.com ) _
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