By Laura Brown

Dean Mycszinski doesn’t see much hope for Bay Area traffic problems, and if anyone knows of a solution, he would. Myczinski, director of the California Research Bureau, which provides policy advice to the governor and the legislature, told the Feb. 20 Morning Forum audience that studying traffic is akin to “looking for trouble.”

The roots of the trouble go back to the invention of the streetcar. That system was designed to promote sprawl, because builders, who ran lines out to their new developments, owned the streetcar lines, Mycszinski said.

The advent of the automobile magnified the problem. The first four-lane highway, built in Southern California, “became a parking lot within two years,” Mycszinski said, because the driveways of adjoining homes and businesses interrupted traffic flow. California engineers traveled to Germany to study the autobahn system and the California freeway was born.

Mycszinski said that the California Freeway System Plan, written in 1952, was “the last honest discussion of what it would take to move traffic in California.”

Virtually all new freeway projects were spelled out in that document.

However, only about half of the plan has been implemented and prospects of its eventual completion are highly unlikely.

The social revolution of the 1970s “put people in touch with sharing their unhappiness,” Mycszinski said.

Those who formerly might have acquiesced to building freeways near their homes for the public good began to vociferously oppose them.

Further, the environmental movement branded freeways as immoral. Public support for freeway projects dwindled.

The plan, written by engineers, was “very logical and very naive,” Mycszinski said.

“The plan’s projections of the number of people and cars was very accurate through the 1980s, but did not anticipate the 1990s explosion in population and traffic.”

Mycszinski said that solving the current traffic problems in the Bay Area would require about 180 miles of eight-lane freeways, but there is no land available to build them. So instead, he said.

“There are no plans to fix it, we just map where the problems are.”

Mycszinski said that although 60 percent of the Governor’s transportation budget is directed toward rail transit, rail is unlikely to solve the problem.

“Studies show that Californians strongly support spending money on trains and have no intention of riding on them,” Mycszinski said.

Because “everything is everywhere,” the maximum ridership to be expected for rail transit is only 2 percent to 3 percent of all commuters, Mycszinski said.

“Bart will not carry a significant percent of riders in our lifetime, it will just add density to sprawl,” he added.

Mycszinski did hold out hope that technological advances in car guidance systems and ramp metering lights might have some impact on improving traffic, but predicted that “over the next generation, the future will be unpleasant for those people who are here now.

“The driving force that will reshape the area is what is the least unpleasant option.”

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year.

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