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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT BY STEVE LEUNG
DAVID JOHNSON: I'd like to introduce our first and second speaker. I've been informed that Steve Leung is going to fill in for Albert Yee also. So he's going to be up here for quite a while.
Steve is the Chief of the Office of Traffic Investigations for the California Department of Transportation, known as CALTRANS, based in Los Angeles. His primary responsibility is to provide and oversee safe and efficient operation of 610 miles of freeway, 710 miles of state highways in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.
He's responsible for the traffic handling and strategic changing planning immediately following the Northridge earthquake. In addition he directed the preparation, data collection, and completion of the 237-page comprehensive Northridge Earthquake Recovery Report.
He's published several reports and made various presentations at professional organizational meetings. He's a registered professional engineer in the State of California. He received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Civil Engineering from California State University. Please welcome Steve.
STEVE LEUNG: Good afternoon. I have a copy of what was mentioned during the introduction, the final report of the Northridge recovery. It's a comprehensive report, took one year to prepare by Barton Ashman. However, this will cover everything and anything you want to know about the earthquake. This is a summary report. We actually have thousands of pages of other reports that come together and combine with this one.
I also have my technical report, the paper that Albert Yee and I co-authored and I will have copies of that available as well. It's only an 8-page report. That would be the very brief summary of what this covers.
I really want to thank FHWA, and the Missouri DOT for inviting me to this conference. It's an excellent opportunity for all of us practitioners, academia, and others to meet and discuss some of the very key issues of how we recover from disasters.
I'm going to be doing for an hour, hour and a half is to give a very brief history and also discuss openly with you about some of the things we have learned from the Northridge especially, then a little bit on the Loma Prieta, especially pertaining to traffic recovery.
I'm an engineer myself working for CALTRANS for over 30 years now. I was personally involved with the recovery of the Northridge earthquake. Therefore, I want to share with you some of the things we did on how we quickly were able to restore some of the damaged facilities right after both earthquakes.
Even if you have ever been to Los Angeles, you know this is known as the car capital of the world. In the county itself, we have ten million people and ten million registered vehicles. So we have to drive two cars at the same time for those adults.
Depending on the vehicle, 95 percent of the people commute using the vehicle itself around on a daily basis, and you can see the magnitude of travel in our county alone. I would bet to say that we have the most number of miles of freeway per any area covered and then we have probably the most congestion.
I think we've been rated, as the most congested city in the world. We have over $800 million worth of congestion. That's strictly calculated based on the hours-of-delay. That's not even including what Stu Werner discussed earlier this morning about the economic impact associated with congestion.
So you can see in a nutshell how dependent we are in Los Angeles on the vehicle. That's why I think it is also appropriate of what Allen Masuda, FHWA, the sponsor of this seminar, expressed in his presentation about the importance of discussing the highway recovery effort. LA is synonymous with highway.
I want to maybe just go over very briefly about some particularities and specialties about Northridge. Even though the epicenter is about here, you see the four various major damaged areas. They're all spread out. That's certainly depending on the geographic composition of the layer and location of the faults.
As far as traffic is concerned, it imposes some very interesting situations on us. In fact, it was like having three different earthquakes because all three areas are totally separated. They are independent of each other and their geographical, social area compositions are totally different. I'm going to be talking about each of these areas. I mentioned three, but in effect, there are four major damaged areas. I'll be going through each one of them.
First one, I'm going to be talking from actually top to bottom. Going from Route 5, the major damage is Gavin County mainline, Route 5. This structure was so totally damaged. You saw a lot of damage about this area. This is the major link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And as you see, with a total damage, all traffic is stopped.
In this area, it's very rural with no community or no homes around this area. There's also no by-pass or very little arterial by-pass because of the mountainous area.
In conjunction, the next area is the 5/14 Interchange. This is actually just south of the mainline damage of Route 5. This serves a vital link to the Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Lancaster area, where practically the only communication link is through this Route 14 freeway.
With the total damage of the interchange, all traffic was suspended. There was a huge back-up immediately after the damage occurred. However, because of some very quick decision-making, we implemented some quick detours. The Route 5 and the Route 14 bridge connections between the two freeways were totally damaged and not usable. So we used the service street. Fortunately, there was one very small old road, called Old Road. It used to be a two lane, little mountainous road. It's very lightly used before the damage occurred.
Within 14 days of the quake, we built this detour of four lanes. We actually widened it to four lanes and opened it to traffic and at least alleviated some of the major problems connecting LA and San Francisco. It was built just for the damaged period. The entire interchange was rebuilt, even though some of the structures that did not fall down as dramatic as some pictures you have seen. Every single bridge was rebuilt just to make sure that they have been retrofitted to seismic capability. This was a major effort. During this time of reconstruction, we had to use temporary detour through the area. We implemented high occupancy vehicle where we did not have before. We also dedicated certain lanes for bus and high occupancy so that we can facilitate and reduce congestion.
Some of the delays were up to three to four hours because a lot of people had to go around St. Gabriel Mountain using the entrance crest highway over a very narrow, winding, mountainous road down to Los Angeles from Palmdale and Lancaster. So it was vital that we open up the traffic and alleviate congestion as quickly as possible.
All four areas were different as far as how we recovered traffic and the complexity and the methods used. This plan shows both I-5 and I-14 Interchange on how we utilized a lot of the existing facilities. It's a little complicated but you can see that the picture shows how we converted the Old Road and connected the mainline freeway directly onto the Old Road.
We expanded the usage of San Fernando Road. It was the only usable link for a while to connect people from Los Angeles to the Santa Clarita and Palmdale area.
We were trying to use as much as what was available. One of the major points is having people that are familiar with your own area and know what facilities can be used and expanded in a very short time and know that you can quickly repave and you have your own maintenance staff that you can actually go out and do a lot of work. That's what we did within like a week.
Maintenance crews were working there 24 hours repairing and paving. The Old Road was repaired totally by our maintenance staff and major reconstruction was completed by a contracts.
Now, this is again very different. The Route 118 damage resulted in both directions travel being totally stopped right after the earthquake. However, the eastbound roadway was totally damaged.
We closed all the roadways around both directions immediately for safety. Then we channeled the traffic to the service street. This shows a simple method of just routing traffic off the freeway using the service street, then back on the freeway around the damaged area. So this was the detour plan immediately after the earthquake. It's actually very simple. It worked because the local streets in this area are fairly low volume. Traffic has always been very light and even the mainline volume right now, right here, we're only talking about a little over a 150,000 vehicles a day. So it's not a real high volume freeway. We knew that we could not keep this freeway closed for any extended time. We immediately implemented temporary shoring to hold up at least the structure so it won't fall anymore with all the aftershocks. With that, we opened up half of the roadway and used the other half as a detour. As you can see, this is a temporary connection. One-half is being used.
We shore up the westbound half first, then routed traffic on it. Fortunately, this is a very wide freeway already, and we were able to actually re-stripe and maintain the three lanes in each direction that we had before it was damaged. Within two weeks, we had full capacity restored on this freeway because of the detours. You can see it was detoured through half section.
Then we moved and we built the westbound. So that's how we did this recovery for the 118. I think the bridge engineer did a great job as far as inspecting, making sure everything is fine, or what they can do on a temporary basis for us actually to route traffic back on.
This is the 110 Freeway Santa Monica, the world's busiest freeway. At this time, we have a count of over 400,000 vehicles a day using this facility. If you go there at 1:00 a.m., you'll be jammed. Even lane-wise, there are not a lot of lanes because it's being used continuously day and night. That's why this is one of the heaviest traveled freeways in the world.
As you can see, we had a major problem when the Santa Monica Freeway was totally shut down because of the structure damage. This is a totally different geographical area and a totally different social area. This is highly commercialized, highly publicized area. You have Westwood very close by, which is a huge commercial center. You have UCLA.
So fortunately, again, in here, maybe because of we can call good vision or planning, we have what we call a Smart Corridor already established even before the earthquake happened in here. How many of you have heard of the Smart Corridor? Smart Corridor was actually developed in 1987. It was a vision to coordinate the traffic between CALTRANS, county, and the city, to try to alleviate a core of the wise approach for traffic relief.
The major backbone of the project is to actually synchronize all the parallel routes within this corridor, the Santa Monica Freeway, from downtown, all the way to Westwood. Because it has always been the heaviest traveled freeway in the world, we want to make sure that any congestion would be minimized.
Therefore, using that concept and even though in 1994 only a partial portion of the Smart Corridor concept was completed, at least a lot of the signals for the service street that are paralleling the Santa Monica Freeway were synchronized. They were connected centrally to a control center in the City of Los Angeles DOT office in downtown.
They are able to actually control and adjust the signals inside the control center remotely to facilitate the movement along this corridor. So we utilized that immediately, even though not every route was synchronized totally. The routes that were synchronized, we immediately implemented. For the ones that are not, the City of Los Angeles sent the traffic people out to adjust the signals to allow for the flow of traffic.
We separated the HOV, high occupancy vehicles, lanes from the mixed flow. The mixed flow had to get off the freeway much sooner, giving preferential treatment to HOVs so they could get as close to the damaged area then get back on the street as soon at possible.
In addition, we had one small structure, one-lane on-ramp that just happened to be in the area that was not damaged. We were able to use that facility within the detour area. That one lane of traffic did not have to go through any signals or stop signs in order to go back. It helped quite a bit. This illustrates that you really have to look at and inspect every single facility to see what you can use.
The entire Route 10 was totally reconstructed in one contract. I did a calculation on the delay and it was used to calculate the incentive/disincentive pay. We did have various figures quoted about the delay. The most common figure quoted was $1 million of delay caused by the earthquake just on the Santa Monica Freeway alone. The figure is from the Governor's Economic Commission and it includes various costs in addition to congestion. When we did this incentive/disincentive pay, the estimate that was calculated was strictly based on congestion. That is comparing the before and after traffic on this freeway corridor only.
Fortunately in Los Angeles, we have loop detectors in most of our freeway pavement and we've been able to update our count and volume and speed every 30 seconds. So with that information, we were able to actually accumulate a history of volumes and usage on our highways. With that information and immediately dispatching data collection teams after the earthquake, we were able to determine the extent of congestion that was caused by the earthquake, comparing the before and after. Then we calculated the additional congestion that was being cost. Using that delay, we calculated the total congestion based on the affect of the earthquake.
The incentive/disincentive pay was based on 50 percent of that cost. That's how we come up with the $20,000 per day of incentive pay for recovering of the Route 10. I'm sure that because of that incentive, the structure was totally recovered and back to full traffic within less than three months after the earthquake happened. In terms of the money, we certainly saved a lot by recovering and returning the facility to full use. Certainly the money was well spent.
This slide shows some of the travel options that we used and how we used the different methods to provide detours. Using the primary detour established around the damaged areas, we diverted to other roadways like the Old Road and the Santa Anna Road. We also changed to ride sharing.
In 1994 we did not have extensive HOV facilities in Los Angeles. Today, we do have. That was an opportunity to really expand and encourage carpooling and to move more people around rather than in vehicles. It was very successful.
We did encourage huge formation of new car pools. Many companies went out and bought vans on their own and created van pools for their employees to get around. They' re still around long after the earthquake.
We also changed to transit. Certainly most of you know that Los Angeles doesn't use transit or very few people do. However, especially for the Route 14 Interchange, there is one railroad line that goes through the interchange area connecting the Lancaster, Palmdale area with Los Angeles. It was not damaged. So that rail line was expanded. Before, it was carrying about 2,000 passengers a day; that's the metro link. Then within three weeks of the earthquake, MTA operating the rail line increased the number of vehicles and added four new stations to the line. Within a month, we had 30,000 riders on that rail line.
You can see how important it is to at least utilize and encourage alternate modes of transportation especially when there's very little available freeway capacity. Certainly, Los Angeles is unique as far as not depending or not utilizing the multi-mode transportation. I think we are seeing the problem and we are trying to diversify more and not put all our eggs in one basket by depending on the freeway system so much.
We also encouraged people to stay home and telecommute to keep them off the freeways. However, it was not very successful or widely used because people still liked to go in and see people.
We did six separate surveys, during and after the earthquake to talk to people to find out about their habits, what they did during the earthquake, what they used, did they change their habit, how did they feel. How long they thought they were delayed. That's the reason why we were able to conclude with a lot of the reasoning, the effect of what we covered.
Many people avoided the trips. Certainly those that don't need to travel stayed home. During the first couple weeks, people were willing to change their habits for a short time during a disaster like this. A lot of people just stayed home during the initial stage. We really did not have a big problem within the first few days of the earthquake. People were recovering from shock and businesses were closed.
It takes a little while for people to get back to a routine. That's when the traffic started coming back. That's the time that we really have to handle traffic more expeditiously.
For primary detours, we took several steps. We set up temporary detours right away after the damage. Then we set up immediate recovery. The final stage would be total recovery.
Our maintenance crews initiated the recovery. They know the facility and we had our traffic engineers working directly with them. We forget about plans; we just paved and striped to make everything fit in the field. Their efforts really required very quick decisions. People were familiar with the geographical area; they knew the standards; and they all worked together on a daily basis between the paving crew and assigning people.
The HOV detours were very effective for emergency transit. The public information programs helped a lot too. The media is certainly a vital part in helping as well as hindering sometimes. Even so, we found the media to be a very vital way to get the word out to the public. The media certainly helps us in telling the public where to stay away from, what type of detour we're using, what they mean by HOV lanes, and where the new stations are being built. So it's very important to utilize and work together with the media.
Our accelerated program included incentives and disincentives to get the work done quickly. I'm going to show you three charts showing various statistics about the four major areas.
The first slide shows the volume of the routes. You add 136 to 127 that would be the total I-5, I-14 volume. Then you can see the various costs of the contracts. This is only part of the costs. In many other regions, there were other roadways that need to be repaired. The total recovery cost is three hundred or four hundred million.
This is the time it took for the entire facility to be restored to pre-earthquake condition, not just temporary detour. As you can see, the longest is eight months. The cost of delay, you can see is economic now which is published by the Governor's Economics Committee.
Next, I'll show you the penalty, what we call disincentive pay. We have a range because we had various contracts in the first three areas. Based on the importance of restoring the facility, we estimated and factored in congestion. The incentive pay was calculated straight on congestion. If the project did not alleviate or significantly help congestion, we did not put an incentive pay in. That's the reason you see the ranges. We had several contracts, especially like the I-5/14 interchange. We had four different contracts just to rebuild the whole interchange. Each one was different based on the importance on how they benefited getting traffic back to normal. You can see we had different contracts each one could have been finished earlier than others. All the ones we did have met the date or less than what it called for.
The largest bonus payout was for the Route 10 contract at almost $14.8 million.
We did not have a major delay problem after about maybe a month after the earthquake. We at least restored most of the temporary facilities.
Our ability to respond effectively is attributable to a very functional and effective transportation management center. I certainly want extend an invitation to anyone who would like to see this center. We actually have a new one since the earthquake and we're very proud of it. In 1994, our center was somewhat antiquated.
There are newer centers around even at that time. However, we still feel that ours is very functional. It served the purpose of providing us real-time traffic information from the various detectors. Because we had this, we were able to coordinate a lot of the traffic recovery effort. It served as the focal point of all the information coming in as well as coordinating the recovery crew in the field. Since the inception in 1974 we have benefited by having the Highway Patrol housed with us in the TMC.
So many times, especially during the early stages of the earthquake, information is very sketchy. Most of the time we have to really relying on CHP officers that are always out on our highways. They are our eyes, reporting exactly what's happening immediately after an earthquake. In the chaos that follows an earthquake, it is very difficult to determine what is really true and what is just rumor especially on traffic congestion and traffic control. Which routes are really closed? In the presentation you heard this morning, you heard about on structures being closed and opened on a daily basis. Conditions change especially with the aftershocks. Because based on inspection of the structures and with aftershocks, structures can be closed on a moment's notice. For us to coordinate information at the center is really a monumental task. We really have to have excellent coordination, communication between the field and the center itself. In addition, the center provided all the information on a daily briefing that the governor and the secretary of transportation. They met with the media for daily briefings to tell them what was damaged, the routes are being opened, and what the public should be expected to do. Every day we published a report telling them what routes and the expected delays. So if someone ventured out, they would at least know what to expect in delay. The center coordinates all reports from the field through the compilation of the charts. We give it to the people in charge and they pass it on to the media. The TMC is truly the heart and soul on how we manage to coordinate the traffic management and recovery.
The major plans on detours were developed in the center. The concept of the TMC is to provide the links and controls between the office and all the field elements. We have twelve districts in California and seven TMCs around the State. We coordinate with the other TMCs in case any problems happen, then we can help each other out.
We have multidisciplinary accident investigation teams. This is LA and we are noted for disasters, not just earthquakes. We have riots, we have fires, and we have tunnel collapses. The metrolink-metrorail tunnel collapsed because of a fire. We also have on occasion the Olympics.
These multidisciplinary teams go out to the field in response to an incident. They establish command centers in the field and manage traffic based on the condition they encounter. We have set criteria on where to re-route traffic. Like if it's a ball game that exceeds a certain attendance level. Like if it's a football game, if it exceeds 50,000, we activate a team.
At the center we are able to control changeable message signs. These are electronic boards that we can control from the TMC and display messages to let motorists know immediately what's happening up ahead so they can take evasive action by taking a detour before they get into the congestion. This is very effective, especially when things can happen in a very fluent manner. CMS is certainly a vital element.
We have a web site in CALTRANS publishing every single lane closure. On a daily basis, people can go to the web and learn what areas to avoid.
In addition, we have call boxes. They also come through CHP and we have direct link with CHP knowing all the call box information reporting any troubles.
In California, the 911 cellular calls go to CHP and we get that information in our center. CHP coordinates the information around all of California. We have been implementing this as freeway surface control even before an earthquake. It's very similar with Chicago's total surface. However, the only difference is we contract out instead of using state employees. However, it is managed and controlled through our TMC.
During the earthquake recovery, the freeway surface patrol was very, very helpful in really helping the detours and clearing stalled vehicles and accidents. Those detour routes had very narrow lanes and no shoulders on either side. If there were any blockages, stalled vehicles or accidents, we had absolutely no capacity left. So we have roving patrols constantly driving through those detour areas. On the average, about every ten minutes, a tow truck would be at the accident or stalled vehicle site to remove it to restore traffic. This was coordinated through the TMC as well. The signals and ramp metering were controlled remotely as well from our control center.
Public transportation system was and is one area we were lacking. We do not coordinate well with public transportation but we have a goal to do much better.
Computer aided dispatch is what we call CP users to electronically lock in all the complaints and activities in the field and then relating back to the command center. We have access through the TMC so we know what's going on with all CP offices.
We broadcasted every day from our TMC to the major networks. They had a live camera shooting at our streets taking our CCTV and broadcasting to the public. So we worked very closely with the media. They are right in our center and we think sometimes it's a detriment.
It's difficult to be working when people are watching you all the time.Yet, I think it also serves a great purpose and has a great advantage of really aligning the media to help us broadcast and tell the public what we want.
One-third of our staff is really maintenance staff. We were able to recover so fast because our maintenance people. They are able to mobilize on a moment's notice. Even within 24 hours of the earthquake, our maintenance staff with some contractors were dismantling structures. Most initial detours were handled by our maintenance staff. They have equipment and ability to do that on a very limited and short basis.
We have an extensive system of loop detectors, however, we had to supplement those during the earthquake. I mentioned that in the remote area with comparatively low volumes we did not have detectors during the time of the quake. This was especially true of the 5/14 Interchange. We had to quickly go out and implement and add additional detectors to bring signals and information back from those areas.
During the earthquake, we did have some closed-circuit televisions (CCTV). They were very limited at that time. We have expanded their use since then.
Let me explain the transportation management teams. The emergency teams which are staffed by Caltrans people, have trucks that have changeable message signs and they are on duty 24 hours. They have equipment, cones and signs to set up detours any time they are needed. The teams were set up before the earthquake. We have been using them on a regular basis for major games, fires, freeway closures for more than two hours, and other events. They were just expanded. They were on-call and we even called in teams from other districts around the state to help out so that was a big help.
The messages that we show are real time and we use it only to manage actual congestion and not convey messages like "Have a nice day." We did that before and the public didn't like it.
For the management teams, we do have more up-to-date equipment now. The driver can control directly what real-time messages he displays. This is very effective on alerting the public what to do, what's up ahead, and how to avoid congestion.
Highway advisory radio (HAR) is something we also had been using before the earthquake, but not extensively. We are still not using the highway advisory radio technology extensively for various reasons. We have a different philosophy on what type of information and what would be most effective. If you put the same message on and don't change it, after a while, people just don't tune to the radio again. If you really try to put in real-time information, it's effective but it's very labor intensive. We used HAR and did that during the earthquake. It does serve a purpose during a crisis. But on a regular basis, it's a little difficult to attract attention from the public to tune in while they're listening to their football game.
LA is again probably one of the cities that has the most ramp meters around. Some people hate it. Traffic engineers love it because we feel we have the best we're able to control. We have the full access control now where we have ramp meters because we know exactly how many vehicles are getting on the freeway, we know the capacity of each section of freeway; therefore, we have an ideal situation.
But in reality, we can't. Say for example, high occupancy vehicles (HOV) are given preferential treatment so we don't stop them. A closed system is only as good when you don't have any gaps. When you have gaps, they mess up your ideal situation. We still do not have a totally closed system in Los Angeles. We are working on that. We even have metering connectors, freeway-to-freeway connectors. We actually meter them; they stop before they get on the next freeway. Initially, it was scary. You can imagine people going 70 miles per hour screeching to a halt trying to get to another freeway. We have cars backed up, three lanes of cars, for like half a mile, sometimes one mile trying to get on. It's a challenge to manage and try to have a closed system where you can maximize the capacity.
After all these years, we're still using loops. We haven't found any better mousetrap yet. So we've experimented with various methods such as video imagining, microwave, and infrared. So far, we're still going back to the loop.
Service patrol is a lifesaver. If you haven't established one in a major metropolitan area, I certainly suggest that you consider it. It's costly. It was paid by a proposition for using sales tax funds and it's free to the motorist. Any time there is a disabled car on a freeway, it will be towed away with absolutely no charge and they don't take tips at all. This is a free service; the public loves it. It really helped during the earthquake recovery because that's when we need our full freeway and street capacity.
We used our helicopters extensively even before the earthquake. We have a contract with the City of Los Angeles DOT to utilize their fleet of helicopters, and we certainly took advantage of it during the earthquake. We went up immediately as we were in an emergency. You can't get from here to there except in the air. So that was our set of eyes in the sky. You need to see what's going on with traffic or damage.
Our regional TMC during the time of the earthquake was not that new. The wall map had lights and you could see the routes on the wall. Each light represented a detector station bringing information back to our center. By the different color of the light, we could tell whether it was congested or free flowing.
Immediately after the earthquake, we realized that our center was really inadequate. It was really too small to handle all the problems that came up. So within two months, we let a contract and cleared one section of our building and opened up a new center.
We put in extra infrastructures right after the earthquake: CCTVs, CMS, highway advisory radios, even some of the detectors and we utilized satellite communication because it takes too much time to have power connections during earthquake and during disaster.
Because we had a contract with Hughes before the earthquake happened, we were able to experiment using satellite communication. We quickly continued with that contract and were able to bring back a lot of the infrastructures.
You always run out of space when a disaster happens. All the responding people come over and you're always crowded. We have a new center now. I like to really elaborate how important a functional and effective TMC is. Our new TMC is actually still only an interim one. We already have plans and very soon will be moving in a brand new building again. It should be operating in about two years. It is earthquake safe with the base isolation design for the building. We were operating both for a while before we switched over. Now the old center is totally not functioning. We have briefing rooms, media rooms, and a lot more facility that can handle an emergency much better than before. We're continually expanding. We're not finished yet. We still have some sections where we need to install additional infrastructure.
Many of the reports were published immediately after the earthquake on a daily basis, then on a weekly basis, and then on monthly basis. All of those reports are available in our library in our office so you can see those various reports that were published and prepared.
I just want to mention a few of them. The one I want to really talk about is the public survey report. Barton Ashman Consultants interviewed motorists and residents on their impact. We have six reports that cover the home interview of people around the affected area. We made sure at least one member of the family commuted through the damaged area before they qualified to be included in the final documentation. We asked them various questions, like did they travel, did they feel delay, how much delay, and how satisfied were they with the detour and public transit. A lot of questions were asked and tabulated.
We also did follow-up surveys of the same people that we interviewed for the initial report during the earthquake. Then after recovery was complete, we did a follow-up survey to see how they had they changed their habits. During the earthquake, maybe they took the train. Now are you continuing to take the train now that traffic is stabilized? So we also did that study and published that.
Also, we surveyed the truckers. We asked them whether they detoured using different routes or changed their hours and how much it affected their travel time.
Also, we surveyed trucking companies, asking companies how they handled the impact of this damage or the delay to the truckers. Then we also surveyed the transit users, where if you went out during the earthquake to stations and you rode the bus. Some of the people working for the consultant asked the people, did you take the bus before and are you taking it because of earthquake.
The last report is the interview with the decision makers. We actually had Barton Ashman interview various people that were involved with the recovery. They asked them to make comments, suggestions, and what they felt of the total effort. So all the results are published and documented.
I have a few conclusions based on what we learned. Some of these cannot be emphasized enough. We need alternate routes as in case of Route 5/14. It was certainly a wakening within that section, such an important route connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. We really do not have acceptable by-pass. We need to be looking at lifelines. If they're that important, try, at least as much as possible, to provide an alternate route when an emergency or disaster happens.
Next, we need alternate modes of transportation. LA is too dependent on the vehicle. We need to diversify and make a multi-mobilization of the facilities.
We need reliable traffic data. Fortunately, being in Los Angeles, we did have very good traffic data before and during and then even better now. We need a functional transportation management center. By the way, when the earthquake happened, we were calling ourselves the Traffic Management Center. We changed to transportation now and that's what we want to be. We should be managing transportation not just traffic. It is really vital to have a functional effective transportation management center.
Next is trained emergency operations staff. In LA because of the various disasters and things like that we have around on a regular basis, it seems we have regular drills through actual events without having to plan for practice drills. But if you don't have the actual events too often, you need trained personnel.
We also need earthquake interagency exercises. I don't need to overemphasize the need for that. People need to be working together face-to-face to the point that they know each other by their first names and they can work better. Many responders have been coming from other areas to help us out. So you need to know these people ahead of time to be really effective in your overall response to a disaster.
That's the next recommendation. You need to utilize outside assistance. I really truly feel that that's a God sent to us in Los Angeles. It was during the Northridge. We were able to call various people, very experienced, very knowledgeable people from various areas, including Albert Yee from our Oakland district office, who's supposed to be here this afternoon but was not able to for emergency reason.
So people from outside of our district with some experience are very helpful. They know what to do and don't need a lot of explanations. We actually had people from San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento headquarters, and from all over the State. FHWA certainly helped us tremendously. So we need to not be afraid to use and call on people with that experience to help during times of emergency.
By the way, before I conclude here, I think another major, major really credit should go to FHWA. They really did an excellent job on helping us and not hindering us. They pay a hundred percent. They have check pocketbook. Like the contract we have with Barton Ashman, we were able to actually advertise, select and award within three weeks of the earthquake.
We already have the people onboard to help and supplement our own staff. We were using our own people before we were able to hire Barton Nashman to collect traffic data. But immediately after we had the contract, we were able to free up our regular traffic engineers to do the more important work of planning for the final and more immediate closures and detours. The consultant hired outside help to do the day-to-day traffic collection information.
Any questions ?
AUDIENCE: What were the conditions that you established for truck traffic, emergency vehicle traffic, daily commuters, so on and so forth? Did you allow truck traffic to move any time of the day or night or did you restrict them to night traffic? What kind of conditions did you put out there?
STEVE LEUNG: Certain areas, we actually restricted truck traffic totally. Like on the Santa Monica Freeway, we restrict truck traffic totally and only allow the commuters because it's already a very low volume truck traffic route.
In areas like the grapevine where over 20 percent of the traffic on Route 5 is truck traffic, we cannot restrict them. We try to get voluntary cooperation from the trucking industry to change the route and use the secondary detours rather than the main Old Road detour because of the narrow lane. We only had ten-foot lanes for the Old Road or the four lanes, two lanes each direction. So that was a voluntary action. We did implement both.
Some that are restrictive; some that are incentive. On the Route 5/14 Interchange, we actually established a truck route. That's because of the high volume of trucks. We actually established one lane for truck usage. It depends on the location and the particular situation. So we tried to adjust based on the need and the characteristic of that route.
AUDIENCE: In terms of all the traffic congestion or management flow; what would you do different than what you did?
STEVE LEUNG: Probably one area would be the communication. The one major maybe area that I would like to see improved is communications. Even our center, immediately after the earthquake, the phones did not work. Even cellular phones were tied up and not really usable.
We've been looking into having a dedicated emergency line for only DOT and emergency people. All it takes is 5 percent of the people dialing at the same time and all your system will be down. I try to call out my cellular phone many times and it's busy. The line's not available.
So just imagine if you have a disaster. I bet you, all your cellular phones or landlines will not be working. You really need good communications. It's chaotic. During the early stages of the earthquake, we were not really able to ascertain exactly what routes were closed or what routes were open.
We have our own radio system but it only allows one person to talk at a time and we have hundreds of people. On normal a basis, it works well. But during an emergency, that's not really useful. So we have to develop certain means to communicate effectively during an emergency. Otherwise, what else would I do differently? Actually, I think we did pretty well. I really don't think I can say that we would make any major changes. It was a collective effort by a lot of people. We reacted based on the conditions given to us and we managed at that time the best we knew. Like I said before, we have a lot of experience with disasters in LA. The Northridge just happened to be bigger than anything that we ever had. We pretty much utilized all available resources we had.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned as part of your detour, you set up separate lanes for high occupancy vehicles and buses. How did you actually separate the traffic to ensure that? Was there any enforcement?
STEVE LEUNG: Yes. I think Michael Peterson of CHP talked about this a little bit already. When we set up detours, we definitely have to have enforcement. The nice thing is that we have a very close and good working relationship with CHP. They are able to really help us out and enforce what we set up for the high occupancy vehicle lanes as well as the truck lanes.
Right now, we have 352 miles now of HOV lanes in Los Angeles County alone. So CHP enforces that and the fine is $271. If you are a single driver and you use the HOV lane, the fine is $271. We have signs, big signs telling people so they pay attention sometimes.
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