Novato Advance, Wednesday February 14, 1990, Editorial

Time to face traffic realities

The North Bay Land Use and Traffic Reduction Conference held in Petaluma was not one of the most exciting or glamorous events ever conducted in the Bay Area. Given that it was only talk — and goodness knows we’ve had enough of that about transportation — it was not one of the most important.

However, what many of the participants had to say was extremely important and we should be listening carefully.

Linking the comments and concerns was the common idea that we have to change the way we think about transportation or the problem is going to get progressively and rapidly worse until we end up “carcooning.”

That’s the term used by Ralph Cipriani, principal transportation staff planner for the Southern California Association of Governments. It refers to adapting to living in a car.

It’s rapidly coming to that. Many Novatans now spend as much as two of the day’s precious 24 hours in their vehicles and they are learning to adapt, taking advantage of today’s technology to catch up on world affairs on AM radio; enjoy classical music on FM radio; thrill to a classic novel on the stereo; conduct business on a cellular phone.

That’s one alternative.

The other, as a multitude of transportation experts pointed out at the day-long conference, is to change the way (and the distance) we travel.

If we are to avoid living in our cars, we have to establish our independence. Almost to the “expert,” those in the transportation field agree that our only real commute option is mass transit. We have to get out of our cars and onto buses and trains. Of course, in the case of the North Bay, we first have to establish the rail lines and the feeder bus systems.

The other real key to solving our transportation tangle is proper land use. There isn’t nearly as much agreement on this issue as on the need for mass transit, but it is apparent that we have to build jobs and housing closer together. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is also apparent that we are going to have to have higher density development built along a central transportation corridor. Without proper land-use planning, mass transportation simply won’t be effective. People will be too spread out for it to function.

What it realistically means is that solutions for solving our transportation problems are caught smack in the middle of a political whirlpool. On one side environmentalists shudder and turn green at the mere mention of the word “density.” On the other, developers and builders blanch at the whisper of a “regional planning agency.”

Yet, both have to happen if we are to make a success of mass transit.

We have to take off the political blinders and face reality — the 21st century is just around the corner and LA is getting closer all the time.