As part of the plan, air-quality officials in Southern California are doing what regional planners in northeastern Illinois can only dream of. They are ordering thousands of companies to create ride-sharing programs, or face fines of up to $25,000 a day.
And they are not kidding. The May Department Stores Co., was fined $150,000 after failing to meet its deadline for submitting a ride-sharing plan. More than 3,000 companies have complied since the first ride-sharing edicts went out in 1988.
Many Southern California companies provide monetary incentives in an attempt to meet the air-quality district`s goal of getting one-third of all commuters into car pools or onto mass transportation.
Disneyland officials set up a car pooling program that gives employees preferential parking and a chance to win prizes, including $50 gift certificates for dinners and Mickey Mouse nylon backpacks.
TRW Inc. officials give employees tokens worth $1 each time they get to work in something other than a single-passenger automobile. Employees who collect five tokens receive a $5 gift certificate, redeemable at a nearby shopping mall.
The Air Quality Management District is at the forefront of national efforts to control traffic congestion.
”We have no influential regional agencies in this country to deal with problems caused by growth, but the air-quality district comes the closest,”
says Robert Cervero, a professor of planning at the University of California at Berkeley. ”They potentially have some ability to wield a club.”
The agency`s efforts also are significant because they enlist businesses in the war on traffic congestion.
”The public sector is not capable of meeting this challenge on its own,” says Christopher Leinberger, a managing partner with Robert Charles Lesser & Co., a Los Angeles-based consulting firm specializing in urban development.
Yet that clout has not endeared the Air Quality Management District to Southern California business leaders, who charge it is sacrificing economic growth to environmental objectives.
”It would be as if, in Chicago, you had an agency of a single-purpose nature suddenly telling local governments they will do the following things,” says Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.
Air Quality Management District officials reply that they must take drastic action to prevent greater Los Angeles from being overwhelmed by growth.
The population of the four-county Los Angeles area is projected to zoom to 18 million, from 13 million, by 2010. In contrast, the population of the six-county Chicago metropolitan area is projected to rise to only 8.2 million, from 7.3 million, over the same period.
Without stringent measures that will dramatically reduce car pollution and other emissions, air quality officials say, greater Los Angeles will be so overrun with cars and smog that it will be flat out impossible to meet EPA air-quality standards.
”This is a regional agency that establishes priorities,” says Tom Eichhorn, a spokesman for the air quality district. ”The state legislature has told us in no uncertain terms to get on with it.”
Despite some initial successes in its ride-sharing program, the Air Quality Management District faces an uphill battle in its war against the car culture of Southern California.
At TRW`s 800-employee office in the Orange County suburb of Orange, for example, the number of ride-sharing commuters has risen to 180 from 109 last year after the company spent about $13,000 on its incentive program. Still, the total remains short of the target of about 260 ride-sharing employees mandated by the air-quality district.
Increasing the number of ride-sharing employees won`t be easy because jobs and housing are so widely dispersed throughout Southern California-just as they are in Chicago`s suburbs.
At TRW there are few clusters of employees who live in the same area, which makes organizing van pools especially difficult. To date, TRW doesn`t have a single employee who gets to work by van pool.
”Californians are in love with their cars,” sighs Walter Reese, the manager in charge of TRW`s ride-sharing program.
To get more employees to share rides, companies like TRW may have to come up with better incentives. Or the Air Quality Management District may have to order firms to charge employees for parking.
Yet even if these measures can make a significat dent in the number of commuters who drive alone, they will only be treating the symptom of the underlying problem causing traffic congestion-a failure of local governments to halt sprawl.
”The root of this is land use,” says Cervero, the University of California professor of planning. ”We have these low-density, sprawling office parks. We don`t tend to build housing near jobs.”
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The land-use portion of the Air Quality Management District`s 20-year smog reduction plan takes dead aim at the shortages of affordable housing in job-rich areas such as Orange County, the same problem plaguing lower-income people who work in affluent Chicago suburban areas like Du Page County.
The land-use plan was drawn up by the Southern California Association of Governments, which includes about 170 municipalities in the Los Angeles area. ”Our current use of the land-the physical separation of jobs and housing-contributes to the food of vehicles on the region`s freeways and arterials each morning and evening, as workers drive from to work and back again, consuming vast amounts of scarce fuels and polluting the air,” the plan says.
To resolve that problem, the plan proposes dividing greater Los Angeles into 24 subregions, each incorporating several cities. The goal is to make each subregion a self-sufficient unit that contains a balance of jobs and housing.
That aim sounds as laudable as the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission`s affordable housing campaign, which encourages Chicago suburbs to get developers to build 15 affordable housing units for every 100 new jobs created within their borders.
In practice, however, the Southern California housing plan will involve a drastic shift of social and political priorities, one comparable to affluent Du Page County suddenly deciding that it wants to provide housing for its moderate-and low-income workers who currently cannot afford to live there.
In Orange County, for example, Fullerton Mayor A.B. Catlin rails against the idea of encouraging the construction of low-income housing. He says it would drive up the costs of social services for the poor at the expense of services that go to existing residents.
And in the city of Los Angeles, the spokesman for a developer who wants to build the largest single mixed-use development in the city`s history says the Air Quality Management District has no right to take a stand on land use issues that should be decided by elected officials.
”They are trying to usurp local authority in a number of areas, and the various local authorities resent the hell out of it,” rages Paul Clarke, spokesman for the Porter Ranch Development Co.
Ultimately, the Air Quality Management District must decide whether it will simply comment on proposed developments, allow cities or counties to enforce its planning guidelines, or become a land use authority itself.
”We`re going to present those options to the public and try to engage the area in a debate and try to determine what role is appropriate,” says Bill Kelly, an agency spokesman. ”The legislature has given us power, but how should we exercise it? What`s the appropriate way?”
Earlier this month, former San Franciso Mayor Dianne Feinstein, now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, proposed that the state take the Air Quality Management District`s land-use goals a step further.
She urged the creation of regional commissions to regulate major commercial and residential projects. They would be overseen by a statewide Growth Management Commission.
”The feeling out here is to get institutions to work together to work regionally or subregionally to solve these problems,” says Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. ”People realize these problems require policies beyond the local level.”
And that feeling is becoming heightened as the environment moves higher on the national agenda.
”If there`s going to be anything with teeth that`s going to force localities to coordinate their land-use programs, it`s going to be the air quality issue,” Cervero says.
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In Chicago`s suburbs the concept of regional planning with teeth is barely under discussion, save for Knuepfer`s unsuccessful advocacy of the issue.
Moreover, the prospect of an extraordinary federal effort to reduce air pollution in the Chicago area, which could have involved measures like gas rationing, has been delayed until at least 1994 after a settlement between the EPA and Wisconsin and Illinois.
The settlement followed months of negotiation and resolved a two-year-old suit brought by Wisconsin, charging that the EPA was not forcing Illinois to come up with an effective plan to control ozone, which Wisconsin claimed was drifting across the state border.
”The federal government is not chomping at the bit to come in and do transportation plans, but it is something we will do if necessary,” says David Kee, a top official with the U.S. EPA`s Midwest division.
That leaves millions of traffic-weary commuters to rely for relief on the Chicago area`s 262 suburbs, the same collection of jurisdictions that so far has proved itself unable to cope with the emergence of the 21st Century metropolitan area.
If those local interests remain at war, the regional interest will continue to be the first casualty.
As the Southern California Association of Governments says in its regional plan for the Los Angeles area:
”The days when everyone could drive a huge car in lonely splendor are numbered. . . . We will have to work much more closely to address the problems-coordinating new job and housing location decisions, locating new facilities, addressing the impact of projects for the immediate neighborhood and region.
”The alternative to cooperation and change is gridlock.”
