Gridlock in Los Angeles - the city of gritted teeth

Back in the Golden Age, when Los Angeles was the catalyst for an American Graffiti-style car culture, drivers cruised endless freeways, rolling on cheap gas, preferably with the top down. Today that halcyon vision seems as distant as a Greek myth.

The present is darker, a noir world evoked by LA artist Sandow Birk's take on Dante's Inferno. In one of his lithographs a huge devil, elbows propped on a clogged downtown freeway, stuffs hapless drivers into his maw.

The real belly of the beast sits in a basement below City Hall, not far from Birk's hellish vision, where the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system uses sensors embedded in asphalt across the megalopolis to monitor traffic. Drivers who despair at delays caused by jams on Auckland's harbour bridge should spare a thought for their cursed brethren in LA.

Each day 11 million people make 30 million vehicle trips along 10,460km of streets - connected to 1368km of state roads and freeways - a total of 160 million kilometres of driving. These figures will increase exponentially as California, home to 36.8 million, or one-in-eight Americans, grows. Last year the state welcomed 539,000 legal immigrants - and an unknown number of illegal arrivals. Most headed to Los Angeles.

The population has rapidly outgrown the capacity of roads to carry more vehicles. Gridlock is a way of life in LA, along with traffic smog, disintegrating roads, and freeway shootings. "Sig Alerts," incidents that tie up traffic, are part of the driver lexicon. The Public Policy Institute of California says that a third of LA County residents are so disenchanted with this that they plan to leave within five years.

As the mayoral race comes down to the wire, traffic woes have emerged as the most common public complaint. In a recent editorial the Los Angeles Times described LA as "The Capital of Gritted Teeth".

Or, as Mike Lawson, head of Transportation California, a business advocacy group, puts it: "Back in the 1960s California had a state-of-the-art transport system. It's deteriorated to Third World status."

Indeed, LA is a city with First World expectations trapped within a Third World reality. No wonder Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger drives a military-style Hummer. It may be a gas-guzzling monster, but sometimes it seems the best vehicle for tackling LA's mean and pitted streets.

Starved of money and long overdue for repair, the city's infrastructure is in a wretched condition. Harassed drivers, eyes already cocked for people intent on running red lights, must also watch out for axle-crunching craters that add an average US$705 ($955) a year to vehicle maintenance costs for new tyres and to fix shattered suspension systems.

This year's epic rainfall - nudging the highest total since records began in 1877 - has made conditions even worse. Since the rainy season began in December the city has repaired some 47,400 potholes.

For the 48 two-person road crews charged with filling them in it is a losing battle. Mayor Jim Hahn, fighting desperately to defeat challenger Antonio Villaraigosa - widely expected to be the city's first Latino mayor since 1872 when polls close on May 17 - has rashly promised to fix reported potholes within 24 hours. I guess no one reported the crater at the end of my street, which has steadily spread for the past year.

Whoever wins will inherit a poisoned chalice. Two years ago the City Engineer estimated it would cost US$10 ($13.54) billion to overhaul LA's neglected infrastructure. Fractured pipes that leak water and sewage, crumbling bridges, and shattered streets and sidewalks are now at crisis levels.

As such, the city is a microcosm of both the state and the nation. Last year the Californian Transportation Commission warned that the state's "transportation programme is in crisis and on the verge of collapse".

And in March the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that the nation's infrastructure - roads, bridges, dams and the like - is literally disintegrating. A fix was estimated to cost US$1.6 ($2.17) trillion.

Given the perilous state of both state and federal finances, it seems unlikely that the slide will be arrested anytime soon. Nonetheless, the consequences of ignoring this looming crisis will be serious indeed.

TAKE Los Angeles. The city prides itself on being a laboratory for new ideas. Indeed, the automobile played a key role in spawning what is a widely imitated urban model: single homes in sprawling suburbs linked by freeways. Along the way LA metamorphosed from a desert backwater into America's second city, the hub in a state economy ranked as the world's seventh or eighth largest [depending on the strength of the US dollar].

Whether this model remains viable is a moot point. But what is not in doubt is that LA's neglected infrastructure - in particular its roads - now threaten the prosperity that has made the California Dream possible.

Standing still in traffic and lengthy commutes take a toll. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, each LA commuter wastes US$1668 ($2259) a year in excess fuel costs and lost time because of traffic delays.

Time is money. LA's traffic woes are often dismissed as a local issue, but gridlock has national economic ramifications, for both the US economy and the future of car-based urban areas in the 21st century.

Take the 710 Freeway. Notorious for its potholes and jams, the 710 is the main artery into America's largest port complex at Long Beach. Last year this port, key to the vital US-China trade, handled US$264 ($357) billion worth of freight. The 2005 total is expected to top US$302 ($409) billion.

Yet, this crucial part of the US infrastructure is captive to a crumbling highway. Plans are afoot for dedicated truck lanes from the sea to "inland ports" - vast storage areas in the desert - but funds have yet to materialise. Solutions are mostly of the band-aid variety: more left-hand turn signals, toll roads, expanded freeways, reversible one-way streets, even mountain tunnels to cut traffic times.

What's missing is a national plan in which LA's significance to the economy is recognised. "The US has a very screwed-up policy towards transportation," says Jack Kyser, chief economist with the LA County Economic Development Corporation. He cites term limits, which cause politicians to spend much of their time fund-raising for re-election, lack of cash, and parochial thinking as obstacles to improvement.

It may seem axiomatic, but a strong economy that expects to deliver goods and services needs a working infrastructure. Strategic thinking - the sort that got the freeway system started in the 1950s - is called for. But this time round planners need to ponder the post-gasoline era.

The age of solo car trips, still rampant in LA, is unsustainable. There are just too many vehicles and not enough space to cram them into. Add fuel prices and carcinogenic exhaust pollution, and it is apparent that if mega-cities are to survive they need a new transport paradigm.

This will involve greater mass transit. For while LA's bus network averages 1,178,688 riders each weekday, and it has a popular fledgling rail system (albeit one that doesn't connect to LA's main airport), neither can cope with the number of commuters still stuck in traffic.

Ironically, LA County once had one of the world's best mass transport systems, the legendary Red Cars.

The tramways stretched from the Pacific deep into the hinterland. But by 1961 the Red Cars were no more, vanquished after a concerted campaign by the automobile and fuel industries to get consumers into the driver's seat.

Poetic justice, anyone?