Gridlock will double only if our brains remain in low gear. The Reason Foundation, our Transportation Commission director, the quoted transportation commissioners and many transportation "experts" haven't shifted mental gears in the last couple years. They are stuck with building more roads - 500 lane miles in Oxnard, Ventura and Simi Valley for $1.4 billion or adding trains or buses at even greater cost or some blend of the first two items.

Experts, including Caltrans planners, have realized we have the technology to build cars that won't have accidents. (Cross-reference that fact with The Star's Sunday Business Section article, "States look for ways to fight insurance fraud." No accidents, low insurance rates, no fraud.) And those experts recognize that accident-free cars relieve congestion. I repeat - if you add brains instead of lanes or buses and trains, you get individual cars with the carrying capacity of mass transit. We could safely put two to three times the cars in the same lane mile. We can eliminate congestion without more lane-miles by using our brains so that cars behave like mass transit, whenever congestion threatens.

Personally, I ride a bicycle to work and believe the safety issue trumps all. Consider The Star's Saturday editorial, "Highway death toll is frightening." In general, we've been working hard on all the safety measures and appeals to responsible driving for half a century. And we have had success, likely keeping the carnage at a little over 40,000 American deaths a year. A less-intensive effort would have at least twice the deaths. Accident-free cars would quickly reduce America's traffic accidents from 6 million to fewer than 60,000 per year (deaths from 42,000 to fewer than 400).

Rather than low-gear debates of lane-miles, taxes spent on roads or tolls collected on roads, or buses and trains, I prefer debating the best way to implement the existing technology. We need a Transportation Challenge, an imitation of the successful 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and the sequel 2007 Urban Challenge.

A challenge is a good way to ensure the technology we get is exactly what we want with privacy, bicycle and pedestrian safety in addition to motorist safety, performance with average fuel efficiency to better than 50 mpg. (Perfect safety removes one major incentive for low mile-per-gallon vehicles. Twice the mpg is also half the air pollution.) And double or triple road capacity (eliminate congestion).

You can find details of how to structure a challenge so that people actually spend less on transportation (much lower insurance rates) at http://www.ConversantCars.com . Or you can consult with intelligent transportation systems experts who know we already have the technology for accident-free and congestion-relieving cars.

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