Nestande Urges End to Car-Pool Lanes on Costa Mesa Freeway

Complaining that new high-speed car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway are a “severe safety hazard,” California Transportation Commission Chairman Bruce Nestande on Wednesday called for turning the lanes over to regular motorists and bringing an immediate halt to the 2-month-old car-pooling experiment.

“We’re going to have a major accident there, and we’re going to end up paying as much on a lawsuit as we would to have done it right to begin with,” said Nestande, who believes that car-pool lanes should be built only where there is enough room to separate them from slow-moving traffic with concrete barriers.

Nestande’s concerns echo those of a committee of regular Costa Mesa Freeway commuters, the Committee for Highway Safety, which has grown to more than 100 members during the past few weeks, all of whom share fears that it is unsafe to place car poolers traveling 55 m.p.h. in a lane directly adjacent to stop-and-go motorists, divided only by a painted yellow line.

90-Day Trial Run

The car-pool lanes, one in each direction striped into the freeway median, began a 90-day trial run in mid-November, posting significant reductions in freeway commute times for both car poolers and motorists in regular travel lanes. A citizens’ advisory committee is scheduled to decide in early March whether to keep the lanes or open them up for regular use.

Accidents on the freeway have not increased appreciably since the car-pool lanes went into effect, according to Caltrans figures that show collisions numbered 26, 14, 28, 31, 39 and 16 during each of the first six weeks of operation, compared to 28 accidents during a week in October before the lanes were opened. The lowest tallies were for the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Total accidents along the freeway during the first month of operation of the car-pool lanes came to 87, including 15 in the commuter lane and 31 in the adjacent lane.

Lack of Enforcement?

In a letter Wednesday to Caltrans director Leo Trombatore, Nestande, a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors who commutes daily on the freeway to Santa Ana from his home in Orange, said his primary concerns are safety and the state’s potential vulnerability to a lawsuit.

“With the status of joint and several (deep pocket) liability in California today, we’re setting ourselves up for a very substantial lawsuit. I believe the fact that there is no barrier precluding lane changes and controlling entrances and exits establishes a severe safety hazard,” he said.

The problem is compounded by an apparent lack of enforcement of regulations prohibiting motorists from entering and exiting the lanes except at designated points, Nestande said.

“I personally observe many vehicles switching across the double yellow line from a slow-moving lane to a fast lane. (But) I have yet to witness a single citation along that route; in fact, I rarely observe any patrols along that freeway.”

Nestande said he is also concerned that he has “yet to see a single OCTD bus or company van” in the commuter lanes, even though they were designed in part to encourage use of transit and van pools.

For those reasons, Nestande said, it is his “strong feeling” that the newly striped lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway “ought to be available to all motorists at all times without restriction.”

“Unless I’m presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, my personal experience has convinced me to oppose similarly constructed commuter lanes in California,” including a similar trial commuter lane project on the Artesia Freeway, Nestande said.

But Nestande said he will nonetheless “strongly support and encourage” construction of car-pool lanes that are safely set off from other traffic with concrete barriers, such as the El Monte Busway on the San Bernardino Freeway. Lanes with that kind of safety protection could be installed on the Costa Mesa Freeway later when it is widened, he suggested.

Orange Mayor James Beam, chairman of the advisory committee that is evaluating the car-pool lanes, said Wednesday he could not respond to Nestande’s complaints because he had not yet seen the letter.

But after a meeting Tuesday with members of the Committee for Highway Safety, Beam said he plans to recommend extending the trial period for the commuter lanes to a full year to give county officials more time to evaluate whether they are working.

“The car-pool lanes appear to be working. They need some fine-tuning, but, on balance, we should expect that they will last,” he said.

A Caltrans report on the lanes’ first 30 days of operation said they were carrying 21% more people in 37% fewer vehicles during the three-hour peak period.

Chairman’s Comment

Joe C. Catron, a former race car driver who heads the Committee for Highway Safety, said the committee will probably not object to extending the trial period if the extra time is genuinely needed to gather more information.

“I have the feeling that they’re a very concerned committee of people that are trying to do the proper and right thing with this freeway,” Catron said of the citizens evaluation committee. Catron said his own committee will formulate an official position following a meeting Jan. 16.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Transit District, in response to Nestande’s complaints that there are no OCTD buses using the car-pool lanes, conceded that the district has not had time to launch express bus service along the freeway.

However, the Transit District has worked with private employers to establish more than 500 new car pools along the Costa Mesa Freeway route, Joanne Curran said.

“We wanted to fill up the cars first, then the vans, and then the next step would be a bus,” she said.