DATE: Wednesday, October 8, 1997            TAG: 9710080001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT

                                            LENGTH:   99 lines

HAMPTON ROADS FACES GRIDLOCK COMPUTERS MAY UNTIE HIGHWAY KNOTS

Scientific American looks to the future of transportation in its October issue and finds most of us still creeping to and from work along congested expressways. Life on the road in 21st century America may not be all that different from what it is now - at least during the first third of the century.

Hampton Roads has no cause to rejoice at that prospect. Staff writers Karen Weintraub and Debbie Messina told us why in their information-crammed report in the Thursday Pilot.

Hampton Roads is in line for $3 billion in highway funding over the next two decades. But $10.5 billion is needed to underwrite all of the projects - including a third Hampton Roads crossing - that the region's planners and leaders judge to be necessary to accommodate motor-vehicle traffic during peak-usage periods. Even if everything envisioned is built, traffic isn't likely to move any faster. Money for the South Hampton Roads light-rail system under study by Tidewater Regional Transit isn't included in the $10.5 billion. And light rail may not be the way to go - busways might be a better solution.

But as Weintraub-Messina reported, if billions more dollars for roads are not forthcoming within 20 years:

``Route 44 at Witchduck and Route 64 at Bowers Hill will slow to 25 mph or less during rush hours, and traffic on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel will come to a complete stop 21 times every day - up from less than once a day now.''

The long list of road needs - in Hampton Roads and across the state - has yet to appear on the public agenda. To place it there would raise the issue of how to foot the bill to meet them. So leaders of state government, as well as aspirants to leadership, are silent on the topic.

The General Assembly is formally studying the challenge, but quietly. Grass-roots resistance to tax hikes for any public purpose, however merited, is deep and wide. Elected officials know that raising taxes can destroy political careers. They are even quieter when anti-tax sentiment is intense, as it is now. Better to temporize rather than risk being cashiered by the electorate.

Both Lt. Gov. Donald S. Beyer Jr., the Democratic candidate for governor, and former Attorney General James S. Gilmore III, the Republican nominee, are pushing tax cuts. They seemingly agree that simply building more highways won't necessarily relieve Virginians' traffic woes. More and better roads, which stimulate development, soon generate more traffic and traffic creep.

But additional highway lanes and a Hampton Roads crossing between Norfolk and Newport News are essential to furthering the prosperity of Southeastern Virginia, which lags the nation in employment and job income.

Virginia business leaders are asking the contenders for the governorship to talk about the transportation network's multiplying deficiencies, problems that Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, who was governor during the last economic recession, ignored and Republican George F. Allen, whose administration has benefited from improved economic conditions, has slighted. Like the electorate, the gubernatorial candidates seem to be counting on something turning up to banish the proliferating obstacles to Virginians' mobility.

A dozen years ago, Democratic Gov. Gerald L. Baliles persuaded the General Assembly to vote tax increases to unclog the roads, but clog persists and thickens because traffic volume relentlessly expands.

Maybe a technological fix is on the horizon. In ``Automated Highways,'' one of the Scientific American transportation articles, James H. Rillings suggests that automation could be the most cost-efficient way to expedite motor-vehicle traffic.

Rillings, who is program manager of the National Automated Highway System Consortrium, a public-private enterprise encouraged by Congress, says: ``A typical freeway lane can handle about 2,000 vehicles per hour, but a lane equipped to guide traffic automatically should be able to carry about 6,000, depending on the spacing of entrances and exits.''

An automated highway, Rillings explains, would be ``a lane or set of lanes where specially equipped cars, trucks and buses could travel together under computer control. That effort need not demand some giant central computer to direct the movement of all vehicles. Rather networks of small computers installed in vehicles and along the sides of certain roadways could coordinate the flow of traffic, increasing both efficiency and passenger safety.''

In August, Rillings' outfit conducted ``a four-day demonstration of the technical feasibility of automating highways'' on a stretch of I-15 north of San Diego. Japan and Europe also are engaged in automated-highway research.

In one segment of the San Diego demonstration, ``Eight passenger cars started from rest and accelerated to highway speed while maintaining a constant spacing of approximately four meters between them. This eight-car platoon then split by opening the space between two of the vehicles to allow one vehicle to leave the platoon. At the end of the test lanes, the re-formed platoon slowed and came to a complete stop, all the while maintaining its tight spacing.''

The system described by Rillings employs ``digital communications equipment on the roadside and carefully spaced magnets down the center of a highway lane.'' Rillings also describes another system, which uses conventional lanes.

Are automated highways an impossible dream? Possibly not. Micro-processors, wireless communications and electronic sensors have made many formerly impossible things possible.

Trains, trolleys and horse-drawn vehicles were the primary means of moving people and freight on land at the start of the 20th century. The automobile was a curiosity and aviation experimental. Automated highways sometime in the 21st century? I wouldn't rule them out. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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