LA Traffic Is Worse, But Not Terrible And It Probably Won’t Get Better

A mile-long section of the 10 Freeway near downtown is likely weeks from reopening after a weekend fire. The consensus seems to be that while traffic is worse than usual, it isn’t apocalyptic.

An estimated 300,000 drivers a day rely on the 10 between the East L.A. interchange and Alameda Street.

On Monday there was a 15% traffic increase on city streets near the closure and on Tuesday, the detour routes, which include portions of the 101, and 110, saw 26% more drivers than normal, said Los Angeles Department of Transportation General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo at a Wednesday morning press conference.

We’ve avoided “carmageddon” 3.0, in part because L.A.’s gridlock-navigating veterans are filtering through a web of freeways and surface streets criss-crossing the impacted area.

“If one piece of our network goes down, there's a lot of opportunities for people to make changes and move around those things,” said Brian Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. An unexpected shutdown of a roadway with fewer alternatives would likely be more disruptive.

However, these temporary changes are pushing more cars into freeway-adjacent neighborhoods that are already plagued by some of the worst air pollution in a city infamous for its smog.

Muffy works in Boyle Heights and called into LAist 89.3's public affairs radio show AirTalk on Monday.

“We have terrible traffic here, anyway,” Muffy said. “I'm hoping that this incident is going to bring more attention to this community, which really needs a lot of attention because it's historically ignored, even though it's one of the oldest parts of the city.”

The human cost of L.A.’s freeways

Taylor compares downtown freeways to the spokes on a wheel— they radiate out from the city center.

The goal, in part, was to make it easier for people to commute into and out of downtown, but that convenience came at a cost to past, and current residents.

“The people who lived and worked adjacent to those freeways paid an outsized price of the noise and pollution,” Taylor said.

Air pollution can harm pregnant people and their babies. Children who grow up breathing high levels of air pollution are more likely to develop asthma and long term exposure to air pollution is tied to increased rates of chronic respiratory issues, heart disease, and death.

The people in the areas of Los Angeles with consistently higher levels of air pollution are often Black and Latino, and low income, in part because discriminatory 1930s housing policies made it difficult for people to buy homes in their neighborhoods.

These communities are often breathing in pollutants they didn’t create, according to recent research from the University of Southern California.

“We see whiter travelers, people who drive more, driving through communities where people drive less and are less white,” said Geoff Boeing, who co-authored the paper and is an assistant professor of urban planning and spatial analysis. And these commuters return home to neighborhoods that are less polluted than those they traverse.

Historically, some of L.A. County’s whiter, wealthier communities, including South Pasadena, successfully blocked freeway expansion in their neighborhoods.

Elected officials have repeatedly urged Angelenos to stay home and telecommute and if they must drive, to stick to established detours and avoid cutting through downtown neighborhoods.

“Please remember that our downtown streets, particularly those around the impacted area, are some of our most congested corridors,” Rubio-Cornejo said Wednesday morning.

The 5, 10, 60, and 101 freeways all intersect in Boyle Heights.

"The surrounding neighborhoods are hit with the most impact since drivers are taking the streets where many of our students and their families reside," said Mendez High School teacher Rebecca Gallego. She thinks some students were late to class because of the influx of detouring drivers.

St. Turibius Catholic School is downtown, blocks away from the now-closed section of the 10 Freeway.

Principal Audrey Blanchette re-routed her morning drive from the 10 to Whittier Boulevard, and across the 6th Street Bridge to Central.

“There's just a lot of big rigs on the regular streets that we usually see on the freeway,” Blanchette said.

How and why drivers change course

UCLA’s Taylor also studies travel behavior — the how and why of the ways we move through the world.

“People adjust their behavior by changing their routes, changing the time of their travel, and changing the mode by which they travel, in that order,” Taylor said.

That tracks with John Lewis, who’s been a bus driver in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 1989.

“They'll let you know over the radio to avoid trouble areas, but with my experience of the city, I know how to get around,” Lewis said.

Though he doesn’t regularly drive the 10, he said congestion tends to ripple out from wherever there's a big disruption. That’s another well-studied traffic phenomenon: adding more cars to the road doesn’t really impact any one of those vehicles until the thoroughfare fills up completely — “at which point things become very unstable,” Taylor said. See the sluggish snake of brake lights where cars previously zipped along.

Lewis started his commute earlier this week to accommodate known construction projects and any potential residual traffic from downtown.

“We typically try to route around freeways because they’re such parking lots in the morning,” Lewis said.

The 10 Freeway closure altered about 3% of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 1,300 bus routes Monday, according to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. He said the average delay for students at 13 schools Monday was about 10 to 15 minutes.

Will commuting changes stick?

City officials have also urged would-be drivers to take the bus or Metro.

L.A. Deputy Mayor of Infrastructure Randall Winston said at Wednesday's press conference that the E Line, which runs from Santa Monica to East L.A., saw a 10% increase in ridership the previous day.

Taylor, who studied how drivers reacted to the Sepulveda Pass’s 2011 and 2012 construction closures, said it’s unlikely these changes will stick.

“It becomes an opportunity to alert people that these options exist and that that can be a positive effect,” Taylor said. “But it's unlikely that the event itself … might cause people to reconsider their travel choices.”

So when the 10 eventually re-opens, it’ll be back to our congested status quo.