FREEWAY FAST TRACK : Car-Pool Lanes, Despite Some Failures, Are in Motorists’ Future

Bill Hildebrand is a battle-scarred veteran of perhaps the most infamous commute controversy in California freeway history.

Hildebrand, who was living in South Gate and commuting to West Los Angeles, remembers spending hours stuck in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway during the ill-fated 1976 Diamond Lane car-pool experiment. The ordeal, he recalls, left him “frustrated and angry.”

But now, whenever he can find a co-worker who is willing, Hildebrand car-pools from his home in Diamond Bar to his job at Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Newport Beach, using the year-old commuter lane on the Costa Mesa Freeway. “The trip used to take an hour and a half to two hours,” said the 30-year-old policy services manager. “When we use the commuter lane, we save 20 to 40 minutes, which is nice . . . . I think the commuter lanes are a good idea.”

Transportation experts agree that the Santa Monica Freeway Diamond Lane experiment was a disaster. Although many people used the commuter lane, which was converted from a general-purpose lane, overall freeway congestion actually worsened and the accident rate soared more than 200%. After five months, citing an adverse environmental ruling in federal court and public outrage, the state ended the experiment.

Ten years later, there are still no car-pool lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway. But in other traffic-choked corridors throughout the United States, they are becoming increasingly familiar sights on freeways and major surface streets, even as freeway construction is slowed.

In the Los Angeles basin alone, the special lanes have already appeared on both the Costa Mesa Freeway and eastbound on the Riverside Freeway, and the California Department of Transportation is planning to install them soon on portions of the Ventura, San Diego and Orange freeways. The Century Freeway in Los Angeles County, like a new freeway in Arizona, is being built from scratch with a car-pool lane already attached. The idea of giving preferential treatment to multioccupant vehicles is hardly new. According to one report, the practice began in 1939, when a lane was reserved for buses on North Sheridan Road in Chicago. Similar lanes were established in several cities between 1948 and 1968, but car pools and van pools were not included until 1971, when they were allowed to enter a lane previously restricted to buses on the toll plaza of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Influenced by the energy crisis in the early 1970s, state and federal officials began promoting commuter lanes as a way to reduce both fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. The current “boomlet” in construction of such lanes, says Peter B. Giles, president of the Santa Clara County Manufacturing Group, owes its start to concern by employers and developers that congested freeways would limit economic growth and hinder the flow of workers from their homes to urban centers. The primary goal has shifted, he said, from saving energy to preserving mobility.

But while car-pool lanes are welcomed in some areas, such as San Jose and Seattle, they have drawn opposition in other places, such as the San Fernando and Conejo valleys, and Orange County. Indeed, Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) is so upset about Caltrans’ plans to install a commuter lane on the Ventura Freeway that he has introduced a bill that would ban such lanes in California. McClintock said his intent is to provoke a legislative debate in Sacramento about the merits of the special lanes. “I’m not convinced there’s enough scientific evidence to prove that they’re worthwhile,” he said.

Some researchers disagree. Frank Southworth of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Genevieve Giuliano of the University of California’s Institute of Transportation Studies insist that most commuter lanes work well--as long as they meet certain criteria. Among other requirements, they said, the lanes should:

- Serve suburban commuters who must reach a dense urban center.

- Not punish drivers by taking a lane away from regular traffic.

- Serve areas where average commute times have been steadily deteriorating.

- Where possible, be physically separated from adjacent lanes.

Few car-pool lanes meet all of these criteria.

For example, the car-pool lane on Interstate 93 in downtown Boston utilizes space taken away from regular traffic.

Barriers Not Utilized

The car-pool lanes on both the Riverside and Costa Mesa freeways involve commutes to job sites spread along the entire route rather than centrally located work destinations, which makes it more difficult to match commuters who want to share rides. And neither project utilizes barriers, which has resulted in strong criticism from a small but vocal Orange County-based group, Drivers for Highway Safety.

Moreover, unlike the commuter lane on U.S. 101 in Marin County that leads to San Francisco’s severely overcrowded business districts, where parking is costly and scarce, the Riverside and Costa Mesa freeway lanes tend to serve drivers who have comparatively little trouble finding an inexpensive place to park their cars.

Some commuter lanes are plagued by high numbers of solo drivers who violate rules usually restricting the lanes to vehicles carrying at least two or three, sometimes four, people.

In Boston, a traffic officer stands at a fork in the highway and motions violators into a lane that takes them 20 minutes out of their way, back toward the suburbs. In Seattle, motorists are encouraged to “turn in” violators by submitting license plate information via a so-called “Hero” telephone hot line.

Violation rates once hovered near 20% for the car-pool lanes on Interstate 5 in Seattle, but are now down around 7%, according to Kern Jacobson, planning and operations supervisor for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Reaction in Seattle

Sara Johnson, who has reported Seattle’s traffic conditions from an airplane for radio station KING-1090 during the past 4 1/2 years, said: “The car-pool lane is effective, but there are a lot of single commuters who just don’t want to--they actually refuse--to (car-pool). . . . Car poolers are very pleased with it. When there are tremendous tie-ups, I’ll say something on the air during one of my reports, like, ‘Isn’t it a great day to be a car pooler?’ ”

Despite the surge in construction of car-pool lanes, there has not been an accompanying increase nationally in the percentage of people sharing a vehicle between home and job. Indeed, ride-sharing organizations and U.S. Census Bureau statistics agree that only about 22% of U.S. commuters share rides to work--about the same as 16 years ago.

Although many transportation experts argue that car-pool lanes move more people more quickly, they concede there is no single performance rating by which the lanes can be judged. They also admit that some projects have clearly failed. In some cases, there have been increased accident rates. In others--with physical barriers isolating the special lanes--accident rates declined.

“There are trade-offs in all of this,” said Sheldon Strickland, who oversees car-pool lane projects at the Federal Highway Administration in Washington. “You live with some negative consequences in order to gain significant benefits elsewhere in the system. There’s no simple formula.”

No Standard Ratings

“You can’t develop a standard rating system,” adds Oak Ridge Labs’ Southworth, co-author of a 1985 study of car-pool lanes. “Our research has shown that what works in one region of the country will not work in another, even under almost identical conditions.”

In short, researchers say car-pool lane performance is strongly affected by local life styles and politics.

For example, in 1982 New Jersey officials ended a commuter lane experiment on the Garden State Parkway after a television station broadcast a videotape showing that no cars used the lane during a 1 1/2-minute period.

“The politicians are now so afraid of public reaction that they are having a hard time getting up the courage to try again, anywhere in the state,” said Jerrold Huggler, New Jersey’s chief of special transportation services. “And the traffic is now worse than ever.”

In Florida, rules restricting a lane on U.S. 1 in downtown Miami to car pools were rescinded after officials found that the lane drew passengers away from Dade County’s new rail transit line and partially blocked access to rail transit stations.

Questions About Safety

In Orlando, the completion of 31 miles of car-pool lanes on Interstate 4 was delayed because three serious accidents raised questions about safety, and a similar project near Boston was canceled because of bad publicity after a state transportation worker was fatally struck by a truck.

The Santa Monica Freeway Diamond Lane experiment itself was the victim of poorly produced Caltrans data and quick media condemnation, said Palo Alto-based consultant John W. Billheimer in a little-noticed 1978 post-mortem written for the National Research Council, a science and engineering organization that advises federal agencies. Billheimer concluded that the media was too quick to condemn Caltrans and was too willing to accept at face value any information provided by project opponents.

Some states do not even bother to do “before” and “after” comparisons of accident rates in connection with the introduction of car-pool lanes. In most cases for which such data is available, it shows that accident rates generally have increased after the preferential lanes were introduced. Southworth’s 82-page Oak Ridge Labs’ study of car-pool lanes, considered to be one of the most definitive, devotes only two pages to the subject of safety.

“It’s subjective,’ said the FHA’s Strickland. “The issue is really left up to the public and what the public is willing to tolerate. If there were a ton of people out there objecting to the number of accidents going up, state and city highway officials would do something about it. . . . “

Successful Lanes

The car-pool lanes recognized as the most successful in the United States stretch for 11 miles on Shirley Highway in the northern Virgina suburbs of the nation’s capital. The two lanes are reversible in direction to accommodate either the morning or evening rush, and are physically separated from regular traffic.

According to Southworth’s report, an average of 8,614 people shared rides or used buses during the rush hour on the Shirley Highway in 1985, four times the average for each regular lane. Occupancy averaged 2.88 people per vehicle for all lanes during rush hours, the highest occupancy rate in the nation.

But two California projects are also near the top of the list.

The El Monte bus way on the San Bernardino Freeway, also a physically separated lane, averaged 6,490 people per peak hour in 1984. Occupancy averaged 1.76 people for all lanes during the peak hour, the fifth-best peak hour rate nationally.

The commuter lane on U.S. 101 in Marin County, which is not physically separated from regular traffic, averaged 3,750 people during the peak commuting hour in a survey last October, with an occupancy rate for all lanes of 2.13, third highest in the country.

Difficult Assessment

Still, researchers agree it’s difficult to argue which projects accomplish more of the goals set by traffic officials. If increasing the proportion of people using public transit on the highway is a high priority, for example, then U.S. 101 in Marin County was on top as of 1984. But if increasing average vehicle occupancy rates is more important, then Shirley Highway wins hands down.

Caltrans’ credibility has become an issue, since it has a vested interest in making commuter lanes look good to the public. The agency has a major role in securing state and federal funds for such projects, and then oversees construction and operation of the freeways, with guidance from the California Transportation Commission.

In 1976, The Times did its own counts of vehicles and occupants during the Santa Monica Freeway Diamond Lane experiment, and the results undermined Caltrans’ claims for the project. After doubts were raised about Caltrans’ accident rate figures in Orange County, the local transportation commission asked for an independent study. It showed that accidents were increasing on the Costa Mesa Freeway for reasons that were not clear.

Assemblyman McClintock argues that it is a conflict of interest for Caltrans to advocate, seek funding for and build the car-pool lanes, and then analyze their success or failure while continually defending the projects against criticism. He has asked the state auditor-general’s office to investigate whether Caltrans’ car-pool lane studies have been objective.

Problems Cited

Southworth said his and other studies deliberately avoid combining violation rates, extra capacity and other statistics into a single-number rating system.

“I’ve tried it,” he explains. “It doesn’t work. You can’t just pick up a project that seems to work in one place and put it down in another and expect the same performance. It just doesn’t happen.”

After the Orange County Transportation Commission last month made the car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway “permanent” (a decision that is subject to revocation), attention in the Southland shifted to the San Fernando Valley, where Caltrans has proposed the installation of a car-pool lane on the eastbound Ventura Freeway between Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway.

The idea has split commuters into two militant camps.

Ken Bauer of Westlake Village, an Arco personnel manager who shares the 86-mile round-trip commute between the Westlake area and downtown Los Angeles with two other people, says the car-pool lane is “essential.”

Favors Caltrans’ Plan

“A little help goes a long way toward reducing congestion, as was proven during the (1984 Summer) Olympics,” says Bauer, who has testified in favor of Caltrans’ plans at public hearings. “If we can just take a small portion of the cars off of the regular freeway lanes and into a special lane, that will open up the rest of the lanes for everyone else. . . . “

Bauer estimates that he saves $75 in monthly parking fees and $5.73 in daily gasoline costs by car-pooling. Yet the major benefit, he says, is “reduced stress.”

Paul Kahn, vice president of the Woodland Hills Property Owners Assn., disagrees, insisting that the lane would be “a fatal accident waiting to happen” because drivers will swerve into the lane to get around adjacent, slower traffic.

Kahn, a retired pharmaceuticals marketing executive, also argues that the people most likely to car-pool already do so in order to save money, and that creating a special lane needlessly penalizes other drivers.

Some say that no matter what is tried on freeways, drivers won’t be satisfied.

“They don’t consider themselves responsible for the problem,” said Peter Valk, president of Pasadena-based Transportation Management Services, citing attitude surveys. “And they want others to take care of the problem for them.”