Road Warriors : Some Call Car-Pool Lanes the Answer to Heavy Traffic, but Others Call Them an Affront to Personal Freedom

It is a solitary, almost mystical ritual.

A sense of purpose and rightness and order comes of slipping behind the steering wheel each morning, switching on the radio traffic reports, pointing the trusted car down the freeway and launching the first battle of the workday: the commuter wars.

On the Costa Mesa Freeway, the ritual is played out at less than 20 m.p.h. On parts of the San Diego Freeway, it sprints along at 50 m.p.h. and then crawls to less than half that near Beach Boulevard.

Rush-hour traffic congestion has reached the point in central Orange County that the county Transportation Commission today will consider a plan to implement the county’s first “commuter lanes” on the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways.

The proposal to reserve newly drawn interior lanes on the two facilities for buses, van pools and cars with two or more occupants has already raised cries of “social engineering” from those concerned that government is trying to interfere with the sacred--and private--commuter ritual.

Financing Shortfalls

But county transportation planners, facing financing shortfalls that make construction of new freeways or transit systems unlikely in the near future, say the commuter lane plan represents the county’s best hope of easing traffic congestion that is already bad and promising to grow much worse.

“It’ll help, but the travel demand is growing at such a rate, we’ll probably never catch up,” said James Reichert, general manager of the Orange County Transit District.

If approved for an initial 90-day trial period, the Costa Mesa commuter lanes--one in each direction striped into the freeway median--could go into action as early as late November. On the San Diego Freeway, where actual construction of two new lanes is necessary, the lanes would not open until 1988.

Supporters of the commuter lane proposal hope that enough drivers will double or triple up to take advantage of the inside express lane that traffic on the surrounding lanes will be eased as well.

Los Angeles County’s experience with commuter lanes helps prove that out. A similar trial being conducted by state Department of Transportation on an eight-mile stretch of the Artesia Freeway--during rush hours only--has reduced travel time in the regular lanes from 35 minutes to about 15 minutes. Cars in the commuter lane travel an average of about 50 m.p.h.

The El Monte busway takes as many commuters along the San Bernardino Freeway into downtown Los Angeles as all the other traffic lanes combined, Caltrans estimates.

Minute-a-Mile Savings

Orange County transportation planners say they hope the county’s proposed commuter lanes can save drivers about a minute a mile on the 13 miles of the Costa Mesa Freeway between the Riverside Freeway and Bristol Avenue, and on a 24-mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway between the San Gabriel River Freeway and the Santa Ana Freeway.

On the Costa Mesa Freeway, where implementation is proposed first, the plan would work this way: Drivers traveling north could enter the lane--separated from other lanes by a foot-wide painted barrier--at MacArthur Boulevard, Warner Avenue, 4th Street or Chapman Avenue and exit at Edinger Avenue, 17th Street or Lincoln Avenue.

Solo drivers caught in the commuter lane would be subject to a $52 fine. (On the Artesia Freeway, Caltrans has found only about a 6% violation rate.)

While two advisory committees made up of public officials, private citizens and representatives of the California Highway Patrol and Automobile Club of Southern California have recommended a 90-day tryout of the commuter lanes, the proposal has drawn strong reservations from state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim) and outright opposition from Tustin Mayor Frank Greinke.

In a letter delivered to Transportation Commission Chairman James Roosevelt on Friday, Seymour observed: “I think I have a good sense of the voter, not only in my district, but those people who use this vital link (the Costa Mesa Freeway) and are coming from the Inland Empire. By and large, they are an independent lot and don’t take lightly to social engineering projects foisted on them by bureaucratic agencies.

“If they are sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic and see a lane unused but not available to them, I don’t need to tell you what the public outcry will be,” Seymour said.

Greinke has expressed similar concerns, also questioning whether it is fair to build new freeway lanes that all drivers must pay for and make them available to only those who car-pool.

“Car-pooling needs to be encouraged. It makes sense. But giving car pools and buses special privileges will cause a backlash that will be detrimental in the long run,” Greinke said in a recent commentary on the issue.

Supporters of the commuter lanes say the 90-day trial will provide enough time to gauge public reaction.

A recent survey of regular commuters along the Costa Mesa Freeway showed that 75% of them would be willing to give the commuter lane plan a trial.

Few Expect to Car-Pool

Only 8%, however, said they would be very likely to begin car-pooling themselves, even if they had use of a special express lane.

OCTD officials believe they can narrow that gap by educating employees on the advantages of car-pooling and providing incentives to drivers and employers to establish new pools.

Gearing up for the new commuter lanes, OCTD’s longstanding ride-sharing program has adopted a new name, “Commuter Network,” and launched a major drive to set up car pools and van pools, offering privately donated incentives ranging from discount coupons to a sweepstakes with trips to London and Hawaii as prizes.

Employers all along the Costa Mesa Freeway are being asked to make a special effort to contact employees who have expressed interest in car-pooling, helping match them with potential commuting partners. OCTD is providing information on how employee groups can buy or lease their own vans or temporarily lease part of a new fleet of 10 vans that OCTD is buying this year.

But the major incentive is that minute-per-mile saving that the commuter lane will offer, said Gary Edson, Commuter Network manager. “Saving time is important to every single person that lives in Orange County. . . . Ride sharing is not a hopeless case.”

The Costa Mesa commuter survey showed that 31% of those using the freeway to go to work already had two or more in their cars--nearly twice the average on other Orange County freeways--which Edson believes is testimony to existing car-pool efforts and drivers’ frustration with congestion on the Costa Mesa Freeway, where “rush hour” now extends 13 hours a day, five days a week.

31 New Van Pools

“If you’re spending a lot of time in your car going to work, you start thinking about what you can do about it,” Edson says. “You have a lot of time to think about it.”

Already, 31 new van pools have been formed in Orange County this year, bringing the total to 210 coming into the county from Los Angeles and Riverside counties and about 200 leaving the county for work sites elsewhere.

The estimated 4,000 commuters traveling by van pool would take up two freeway lanes for about an hour for the 35 miles they travel on average--about $1 billion worth of freeway construction, OCTD officials estimate.

In the long run, the transit district also hopes to launch express bus service along the Costa Mesa and San Diego commuter lanes--a service that with a few exceptions has historically failed in Orange County, primarily because of abysmal ridership figures.

But transit officials say they have failed because express buses have gotten caught in the same traffic jams as private automobiles and thus have offered no incentive to switch over to mass transit. The commuter lanes will change all that, they say.

And even bigger plans are on the way. The transit district has launched a $1.2-million study of an entire network of commuter lanes and transitways (similar to commuter lanes but with even higher average speeds because of more restricted access) on nearly every freeway in central Orange County.

Light-Rail System

The ultimate plan, which could cost anywhere from $275 million to $640 million to implement, would accommodate up to 140,000 commuters a day on lanes with their own freeway-to-freeway interchanges, some of them elevated above regular freeway traffic.

Park-and-ride facilities now being planned throughout the county would allow commuters to park their cars near home and catch a bus to work.

And eventually, OCTD manager Reichert envisions a limited-scale light-rail system serving the most congested parts of the county with passengers fed into the system once they step off the bus.

Even so, solving the county’s traffic congestion problem will require “a bunch of answers,” ranging from commuter lanes to new freeways to asking major employers to adjust their operating hours to accommodate freeway traffic, Reichert said.

“If you look at all these things that can be done, now you’re starting to get to the solution,” he said. “Not any one by itself will really do the job. You’ve got too many customers with too many needs.”