The sorites paradox is a thought problem well known to philosophy students and attributed to the classical logician Eubulides of Miletus.

It proposes that you envision a heap of sand – “sorites” is the Greek word for heap or pile – and then imagine reducing it by a single grain. It would, according to your premise, still be a heap of sand and would remain so even if you continued to remove one grain after another. Stick by your initially logical premise, however, and you ultimately will find yourself in the illogical position of calling a hole in the ground a heap. The sorites belongs to a group of such paradoxical propositions sometimes called little-by-little arguments in which transformation is obscured by the gradualism of its process.

Eubulides’ thought problem came to mind last week, while reading that the authoritative Inrix report once again ranks Los Angeles’ traffic congestion as the nation’s worst. For those who’ve lived here for a number of years – or, like some of us, were born here – it’s sometimes difficult to point to the moment when the superb personal mobility that we once took for granted bled away, and suffocating congestion became a fact of our regional lives. Last year, the average resident of the metropolitan region spent 59 hours stuck in traffic – in other words more than enough time to have put in an additional week on the job or on vacation. Four of our freeways – the north- and southbound 405, Interstate 5 heading south and the 10 going east – now are among the nation’s 10 most congested highways. An additional 31 stretches of our freeway system rank among the country’s 164 most clogged. To nobody’s surprise, Friday afternoon is the worst time to be on the road, when the average commute from job to home now is more than an hour.

Things, moreover, are likely to be worse this year, as Inrix reports that congestion in metropolitan L.A. grew by 6 percent in the first quarter. The study attributes that to an improving regional economy that has added more than 90,000 jobs over the past year.

All of this leads to a question asked, but unanswered around tens of thousands of L.A.-area dinner tables every week: Why can’t something be done about traffic? The truth is that a great deal is being done – some of it, like adding car-pool lanes while accelerating the expansion of public transit across the region at a scope and pace that outstrips any other such project in the country, is an unalloyed good; some of it, like experimenting with tolls on the freeway system, is socially destructive and short-sighted. Other equally significant and more complex initiatives are going all but unrecognized. Los Angeles, for example, recently completed a 30-year, $400-million effort to install a system of sensors and computers that allow for the synchronization of all 4,5000 of the city’s traffic signals, which are spread across 469 square miles. The system, whose completion is another of outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s signature transit achievements, is the world’s most advanced. Long Beach already has emulated it and, others, like Washington, D.C., hope to do so. You may not have noticed, but across the city the average speed on surface streets is up 16 percent, while gridlock-type delays at major intersections are down 12 percent.

What all this has done, however, is simply keep our freeways and surface streets from grinding to an absolute halt – and, in fact, simply keeping things from getting worse than they are is a genuine achievement. There’s a significant reason more radical and far-reaching solutions remain out of reach: For most of us, the best transportation initiative remains the one that somehow gets the other guy out of his car so that we can use the freeways and streets as we wish. In the meantime, mobile phones, cup-holders, CD players and satellite radio have made many of our cars pleasant enough places to while away an hour or so.

There is, of course, a place in our ubiquitous traffic complaints where cynicism and nostalgia blend, which is the inevitable observation that we’re spending billions to recreate what we once had and destroyed – the world’s most extensive interurban rail system in the form of the old Pacific Electric, the red cars. There’s even an urban myth that’s grown up around their demise, which is that auto and tire companies bought up the old system so they could sell more cars and rubber. They certainly weren’t unhappy to see it go, but the fact of the matter is that the red cars went into oblivion because the majority of Southern Californians preferred cars and the at-grade trolley system snarled traffic in the cities, which fueled widespread public complaints going back to the early 1930s. By the late ’30s the Automobile Club of Southern California was pushing to eliminate trolleys, and by 1941, Pasadena had banished the locals from its streets. The Second World War brought gas rationing, which gave the red and yellow car systems a shot in the arm, but the millions who flooded into metropolitan Los Angeles after 1945 wanted freedom.

The auto remains a symbol of personal freedom around the world, which is why the great new consumer economies in the former Soviet Union and China, countries with well-developed public transit, also are the world’s booming auto markets.

So long as we continue to identify the modern ideal of personal mobility with the automobile, congestion will remain a fact of life. As it happens, our freeways and streets aren’t strangling so much from a surfeit of cars, as they are from an excess of freedom – and, apparently, most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.