The Southern California program was supposed to show the way to fight car-generated smog: Hold employers responsible for getting people to give up driving alone to work by promoting car pools, mass transit, bicycling and the like.
It also served as the model for the anti-air pollution battle to be launched next month in Illinois, when the state begins enrolling the first of up to 6,000 employers with a total workforce of 2 million people under a new federally mandated Employee Commute Options Act.
But after five years of trying, and despite threats of fines of up to $50,000 a day against companies that refuse to cooperate, Los Angeles’ chief air quality officer acknowledges that the campaign to get more people to stop driving hasn’t produced the hoped-for results.
The program, Henry W. “Hank” Wedaa says, “must either be modified or mummified.”
Wedaa’s admission couldn’t have come at a worse time for Illinois, which is having a tough time convincing many employers of the merits of the state’s new commuting law.
Nor does it help clean-air efforts in places like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Houston, where similar programs are in the works.
“This adds a lot of credibility to what we’ve been saying: The Los Angeles program is not working. So, why are we going to do on a national basis what is not working in Los Angeles?” said Jim Allen, president of the McHenry County Economic Development Corp.
The McHenry County group is one of a number of Chicago-area business coalitions that oppose mandatory employee trip reduction.
The uproar is over “Regulation XV,” the pioneering air-quality program of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles.
“We know that Regulation XV is this agency’s most unpopular and, some say, most impractical and least cost-effective rule,” Wedaa, chairman of the air quality district board, wrote in a Dec. 17 memo to board members.
Moreover, Wedaa wrote, the trip-reduction exercise is supposed to reduce morning commute trips by more than 30 percent by 1999. But he conceded that “even with full compliance,” the best Regulation XV can deliver is a roughly 12-percent driving reduction.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Wedaa explained that the Southern California program falls short for two reasons: It costs too much for the air-quality benefits it produces, and it often ties up too much manpower.
“Many companies are spending too much money to achieve their goals,” Wedaa explained, “and within some companies, essentially, there has been some empire-building, bringing more people in to do the same job.”
For example, he said, an aerospace firm that had been spending $25,000 a year on employee trip reduction saw its costs suddenly skyrocket to $250,000, with no better results and for no apparent reason other than more people were hired to run the program.
In 1990 amendments to the U.S. Clean Air Act, urban areas of 11 states-including Chicago in Illinois-were identified as being in “severe non-attainment” with federal standards for ozone, a key ingredient of smog.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered these states to develop Los Angeles-style trip-reduction programs.
But if Los Angeles is now having second thoughts about its own stop-the-driving effort, “that bodes well for the rest of the country,” said Susanne Hogan, executive director of the Illinois Corridor Transportation Management Association in Du Page County, a business group that opposes the Illinois commute options program.
“I can’t believe the U.S. EPA will make other parts of the country implement a program that’s been found unacceptable (in Los Angeles),” said Hogan.
The depth of opposition is evident, Allen said, from the more than 2,000 letters sent this winter from McHenry County employers and workers to Gov. Jim Edgar and members of the General Assembly. The letters demanded that the state contest the severe ozone designation for northeastern Illinois.
However, Jane Armstrong, chief of emissions control strategies at the EPA, warned against jumping to conclusions.
“It’s important to recognize that while the programs being designed by Illinois and by other areas of the country have the same goal as Regulation XV, they are not like it at all” in the way they go about reaching the goal, Armstrong said.
For example, Armstrong said, the South Coast Air Quality District closely scrutinizes every point in an employer’s trip-reduction plan, making for “a very difficult, paper-heavy process.”
States like Illinois have learned from California’s problems and have come up with streamlined plan review processes, she said.
Andrew Plummer, deputy director of the Chicago Area Transportation Study, also played down the significance of Wedaa’s remarks.
“This is more related to how they delivered the program (in Los Angeles), how they put it out on the street and got people all bent out of shape, than with the program itself,” Plummer said.
“If implemented correctly, I don’t think the Illinois law will cost companies a great deal of money per employee, as (trip reduction) supposedly does in California,” said Barbara Hayskar, president of the Northbrook Chamber of Commerce and Industry and chairman of the Illinois Employee Commute Options or ECO Advisory Board.
Illinois intends to offer a prepackaged, “value added” program in which employers would choose from a menu of options-transit fare subsidies, preferred parking for car pools, bicycle racks and the like-and add up the points to come up with an automatically approvable commute options plan.
Hayskar added, “Our ECO program is for congestion mitigation, not just air quality.”
The Illinois Department of Transportation is expected to start registering in February the first employers for its ECO program. The effort calls for a 25-percent improvement over present morning rush-hour ridership levels, to an average of 1.36 people per car by July 1998.
Companies, institutions and units of government with 100 or more people at a worksite will be required to survey their workers to see if they meet the ridership goal. Those that fall short will have to submit plans to the state, describing how they would encourage employees to commute by ways other than driving alone.
Those involved with the Illinois program express confidence they can avoid Southern California’s missteps.
Indeed, Wedaa said, “We’ve been guinea pigs trying the process out. It’s time to sit back and review what (Regulation XV) has done, what its failures are, and what we can do about it.”
