Letting gridlock loose

When Santa Monica officials approved the massive Water Garden office complex, they predicted the project would generate thousands of good jobs and revive a once-tired industrial neighborhood.

They also predicted a lot of traffic.

Twenty years later, both predictions have come true. Just ask Aundraya Reliford.

Five days a week, Reliford, 32, rises at 5:45 a.m., drives 20 minutes to a train station seven miles from her home in Rialto, in San Bernardino County, and catches the 7:20 a.m. Metrolink to Los Angeles.

During the hour-and-20-minute ride, she reads, sleeps or stares out the window, watching miles of motorists stuck on the freeway. Then, she becomes one of them.

At Union Station, Reliford heads for a parking lot where she has left a second car. She ventures onto the freeways for the final 15-mile, hourlong journey to Santa Monica, where she manages library services for MTV Networks.

Elapsed time: two hours, 40 minutes -- on a good day.

In the afternoon, she does it all again, in reverse.

Her daily journey is "absolutely horrific," she says. "It's not the distance. It's the amount of congestion that makes it just about unbearable." Just getting to the 10 Freeway onramp from her office, in the entertainment-industry hub surrounding Water Garden, can take 20 minutes.

Many factors conspire to produce Southern California's traffic. The most consequential is the collective impact of millions of individual choices. In Reliford's case, her loathing of the commute is outweighed by her love for her home in Rialto, with its big backyard where her two young boys can play safely.

Those choices play out in a region that sprawled long before the freeways were built. The pattern of development in Southern California as far back as the era of the Pacific Electric Railway's Red Cars created a horizontal city, one in which people frequently settled far from where they worked.

But individual decision-making alone does not account for Southern California's massive traffic congestion. Actions by government at the state and local level also bear a big share of the blame.

Two decisions stand out:

* State and local officials have not expanded the region's highways and mass transit systems enough to keep up with population growth.

The population of the five-county Southern California region grew 22% from 1990 to 2006, and the total miles driven by motorists has increased about 42%. But the number of miles of highway in the region has increased by only 7.5%.