Traffic Crunch : Freeways: From Bad to Worse

Bob Varady sat down to work at the usual time. A little before 5 a.m., two hours until sunup in downtown Los Angeles. Most people were still snoozing, unaware of the drizzle laying a slippery coat on the freeways.

Varady pecked on his computer, knowing his morning could break two ways. Inside the windowless Caltrans operations center, his job is to help commuters in five counties get to work on time by fighting clots in traffic. With luck, the 722 miles of freeway that tie Southern California into a single, giant metropolis would be purring along.

The computer beeped--no luck this morning. Another monster rush hour had started early.

A big rig had stalled climbing Kellogg Hill and jackknifed across three lanes of the San Bernardino Freeway in West Covina. A simple cleanup job, and few early-bird drivers were bothered. But in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, Varady could see trouble looming.

An accident that set one car on fire was blocking all southbound lanes of the San Diego Freeway. Soon that leg of the freeway would be jammed with long lines of mad-as-hell drivers--most of them one to a car, California style--trying to get to jobs as far as 60 miles down the coast in Irvine.

By 7 o’clock, when the sun had crawled far enough above the horizon to blind bleary-eyed drivers, the entire freeway system would be at risk of collapse. Instead of 55 m.p.h., or even 35, several freeways would slow to 15. Ladders would fall off trucks and send cars swerving in panic. Lines at those annoying ramp meters would back onto city streets, while scofflaws would cruise solo in the lanes reserved for car-pools. Before the morning rush hour exhausted itself about 10 o’clock, there would be three SigAlerts, the radio name for a major freeway incident. A man would also die.

A Good Day

And this was a good day--last Jan. 30, a Friday, when the morning rush hour is almost always the week’s lightest.

It is no illusion that Southern California freeways today seem worse than ever. In the two-plus years since the Olympics teased drivers with a brief look at 55-m.p.h. rush hours, Caltrans statistics confirm the start of a new era of freeway madness.

And it’s not likely to get better. Ever, stress the engineers, professors and urban planners who understand how freeways work. Not unless OPEC decides to radically alter the life styles of Southern California drivers by cutting off their oil supply.

On some days, the worst freeways--the Ventura, San Diego and Santa Ana--already see no break between the morning rush and the more intense afternoon crush, worse because commuters are joined on the road by students, shoppers, delivery trucks and errand-runners. A new “lunchtime rush” has been observed on the Ventura, Harbor and Santa Ana freeways.

Congestion is intensifying faster than the population is growing, faster even than the flow of new cars and trucks onto the freeways--15% in just the last two years, a top California Department of Transportation official said.

Bottlenecks occur at some spots simply because there are too many cars. Even if everything goes perfectly, traffic snags at these places every day. Savvy drivers know how to evade such jams by leaving early or using a favorite detour.

But half of all freeway congestion now--the most maddening half because it can’t be predicted--begins because of the inevitable accidents, stalls and flat tires. The system is so overtaxed that there is no slack to absorb them.

“We have just reached this saturation point,” said David Roper, deputy director of Caltrans in Southern California.

5:30 a.m. --The two incidents Varady faced at 5 o’clock are cleared before his first cup of coffee. They won’t even be noticed at rush hour.

But this morning he’s working with a hand tied behind his back. Traffic control has gone high-tech, and magnetic sensors embedded in the pavement are supposed to feed impulses to a computer in the next room. The computer should then display the status of the freeways on a large electronic wall map. Green lights shine when a freeway link is clear, orange when the lanes begin to slow. Red comes on when the average speed falls below 25 miles an hour, the start of serious congestion.

But for the last seven months Caltrans has been phasing in a new computer program. The map is mostly dark, and it will be for another five months.

Varady, bearded and intent, knows what Caltrans studies show--that traffic patterns have changed. Ten years ago the worst traffic jams were confined to the freeways that pass around and through downtown Los Angeles. Today, the most heavily traveled freeways are found miles from downtown--the Ventura in the San Fernando Valley, the San Diego near Los Angeles International Airport and farther south in Orange County.

The day’s first bottlenecks occur before 6:30 at the extremities of the freeway system, in San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties. Many commuters who fled to the far edges of suburbia to find homes they could afford still work back in Los Angeles and Orange County. So they leave the earliest, drive the farthest and spend the most time stuck in traffic, sometimes spending four hours of their day on the freeway.

6:09 a.m. --One of the radio stations Varady monitors announces scattered sprinkles. “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain,” said Highway Patrol Officer Robert Polzin, who works in the Caltrans center. He counted 404 freeway accidents last Sept . 24, the first rainy day of the fall, on the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift. Ninety involved trucks, the kind of incident Caltrans engineers blame for a big chunk of rush-hour delays. “It was incredible,” Polzin said.

For a region as dedicated to the automobile as Southern California, the inability to clear snarled freeways hangs over the future like a “dark cloud,” an official of the Automobile Club of Southern California said.

Already, the future growth envisioned by officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties is being slowed by angry citizens who, as traffic worsens, are racking up more victories than losses against development plans.

Traffic congestion makes smog worse, deprives people of time at home with their families, wastes gasoline and makes driving a more frantic experience. Instead of listening to a soothing side of Mozart, freeway commuters need to keep an ear tuned to the traffic news.

But congestion is going to keep getting worse, the experts are agreed, even if three new freeways planned in Orange County are built and the Metro Rail subway and connecting rail lines are someday finished in Los Angeles. The only question is, how bad?

“A rush-hour trip on the San Diego Freeway that now takes about 1 1/2 hours will probably take three hours by the year 2000,” the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission staff concluded this year. The Ventura Freeway, already the world’s busiest, will nudge along at 7 m.p.h., the agency predicted.

Imaginative Suggestions

Dismayed officials are dusting off fanciful--and expensive--ideas to double-deck the freeways and build elevated car-pool lanes. Others want to ban trucks at rush hour and use helicopters to clear wrecks. There is also some talk by Los Angeles and Orange counties of trying to introduce toll roads, the first in the state.

Meanwhile, Caltrans is trying a little psychology to ease the load on the freeways. Meters are being installed on most freeway ramps, and plans are to leave them on all day. It smoothes the flow of entering cars and discourages drivers from using the freeways to travel a mile or two to the market.

Breakdown shoulders on the center and sides of many major freeways are also disappearing. They are being sacrificed to squeeze in an extra lane of pavement. It makes a flat tire in the fast lane a hairier experience and requires that the other lanes shrink by a foot. But it’s cheaper than attaching new lanes to the outside of freeways.

The new reality also means more unexpected traffic snarls on weekends and at night for maintenance that can no longer be done on weekdays.

In the Caltrans traffic operations center, Varady can’t do anything about the everyday snags and snarls caused by too many cars. That kind of traffic takes years to develop and doesn’t vary much from day to day.

Clearing the Snarls

His charge is to use his arsenal of computers, radios, television cameras, emergency crews and message signs to clear the accidents and unexpected incidents that snarl traffic.

Some are big disasters, such as the truck spill that blocked the Ventura with crates of oranges one morning in February. The spill occurred at 2 a.m., but there was so much juice and pulp to mop up that rush-hour traffic backed up for six miles and the major east-west streets across the San Fernando Valley were jammed until 10 a.m.

“Stay on the freeway. The surface streets are not viable alternates,” KNX traffic reporter Bill Keene warned listeners during the ordeal. Even the highways through Malibu and Topanga canyons were bumper to bumper to the ocean because of drivers avoiding the Ventura.

These major accidents occur about 200 times a year on the Los Angeles-area freeway system, about half the time because of trucks, Caltrans said.

Sudden Slowdowns

But with the freeways close to capacity for much of the day, something as minor as a Highway Patrol officer writing a ticket can trigger congestion. Gawkers who slow down for a look at an accident are notorious offenders, but even routine freeway events like a drunk driver on the shoulder being handcuffed can cause traffic to brake. And such unexpected braking can set off a chain reaction of slowing that stretches for half a mile.

“A damsel in distress with a short skirt can really mess up traffic,” said Dan Butler, the Caltrans executive in charge of the operations center.

When traffic starts to back up, Varady knows time is crucial. For each minute a freeway lane is blocked, engineers figure that the resulting congestion lasts four minutes. Once a queue of cars forms, it cannot immediately clear up when the original obstacle is removed.

From his console, Varady can light up 44 message signs built above the freeways--not many for an area as large as Southern California, but the number is slowly growing.

Caltrans also has “incident response teams” based in downtown Los Angeles that can roll to a major problem to help control traffic.

But Varady knows his tools are limited. Basically, freeway drivers are on their own.

6:34 a.m. --Report from the Harbor Freeway that a Volkswagen, heading north, has hit the center divider near Adams Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles. The driver may have suffered a heart attack, witnesses report. Two minutes later, a dispatcher squawks over the CHP radio that the victim is pinned in the car. On KNX, Bill Keene advises his listeners , “That will undoubtedly be quite a tie-up there.”

Varady flips on a television camera mounted above the lanes and, controlling it electronically, scans the Harbor Freeway. It is still too dark to make out details, but the moving headlights indicate that traffic is flowing normally; he is skeptical. At 6:39 a CHP officer at the scene cancels the ambulance call, saying the driver is OK.

6:56 a.m. --Even with most of the big wall map turned off, red lights show traffic flow disintegrating on the San Bernardino, Artesia and Long Beach freeways, and on the northbound Santa Ana in Irvine. Varady also knows from experience that commuters on the Simi Valley Freeway are at a crawl as they come into the San Fernando Valley.

On another TV monitor, Varady sees traffic slowing along the Santa Monica Freeway at Fairfax Avenue. He pans the camera like a detective looking for clues. He finds no accident or stalled car but is not surprised. Eastbound traffic often clogs up there, where three ramps feed cars onto the freeway. Two other factors cause slowing there, he says: The freeway curves, and drivers are facing the sunrise.

Varady looks for, but doesn’t find, a bag lady sometimes seen walking the freeway shoulder. “We followed her once from La Brea to Crenshaw,” he says, and then she disappeared up the ramp and into the city.

Southern California’s freeway problem is most notable for its magnitude.

More than 6 million vehicles are registered in Los Angeles County alone. “When I get on the freeway it seems that all 6 million are trying to go the same place I am,” remarked Marcia Mednick, a member of the county Transportation Commission.

Even on mornings when no accidents complicate life, about 300 miles of freeway in Los Angeles and Orange counties are lost to congestion, more than anywhere in the country. In 1963, only 30 miles were backed up on a typical day.

Motorists waste about 628,000 hours a year waiting on the freeways here--time we use to close business deals, apply makeup, decide whom to promote, learn Spanish from a tape and plan the day’s work. The sitting wastes 72 million gallons of gasoline a year, by one estimate.

Planners Saw It

In the 1950s, planners suspected this would happen. They drew up maps of a grand freeway system twice the size of the current network, with arms reaching even farther into the suburbs and crisscrossing the Santa Monica Mountains. One of the most controversial of the freeways would have split Beverly Hills. Another would have run along the beach from Malibu to Los Angeles International Airport.

Some new freeways may yet be built, if political and financial hurdles can be overcome. Plans are well under way to widen key freeways like the Santa Ana and Ventura. But the problem is not lack of freeways, many transportation planners say.

“Los Angeles has as complete a freeway system as anywhere in the country,” said Robert Cervero, a University of California, Berkeley, expert on urban traffic woes. “The problem is that people choose to travel at about the same time.”

In other words, the traffic problem is self-inflicted. Everyone in Southern California talks about traffic. Lily Tomlin rips into the Hollywood Freeway in her one-woman stage show. “Our streets are overloaded,” U.S. Judge Harry Pregerson complains during a hearing on an unrelated topic. The traffic tale du jour is a common topic at morning coffee breaks from Costa Mesa to Burbank.

But after a decade of preaching about car-pools, the percentage of people who drive alone to work in Southern California has gone up, not down.

Women joining the work force are particularly shunning the option to share a ride, perhaps because many need the flexibility of a car to pick up children or shop on the way home. Most new jobs are being created in small businesses, the hardest place to organize car-pools. Most who do join car-pools stay only an average of six months.

With some exceptions, the business world has also ignored evidence that a simple, and relatively painless, shifting of work hours can ease rush-hour traffic. If all companies that start work at 9 a.m. would stagger their shift times over the half-hour from 8:45 to 9:15, traffic in downtown Los Angeles would be much improved, engineers say.

Olympic Illustration

The 1984 Olympics gave a clear demonstration that the number of cars is less important than spreading the flow more evenly. During the Games, the freeways carried 5% more traffic than normal, but regular commuters had it easy most days.

Engineers successfully manipulated the Olympic traffic to reduce “turbulence,” Caltrans’ Roper said. Freeway lanes are designed to be most efficient at about 55 m.p.h.--fast enough to move 1,800 cars an hour, or one every two seconds, past a stationary point on the freeway. If too many cars try to force their way into a lane, those speeding along at 55 m.p.h. have to brake.

The stream of cars moving at 55 m.p.h. then suddenly slows to 35 or 40 m.p.h., and the rate of cars flowing through the freeway lane falls from 1,800 an hour to 1,200 or fewer.

That is the beginning of congestion, and it is what happens every morning and afternoon on most freeways, which are near capacity much of the day.

Dire Predictions

Before the Olympics, Caltrans and other traffic agencies got people’s attention with dire predictions of freeway gridlock. They left the ramp meters on all day on seven key freeways to slow the entry of cars and further discourage drivers. “The reason it worked so well during the Olympics is we scared the hell out of people,” said Dan Butler of Caltrans.

A sizable number of Southern California businesses cooperated by cutting their hours or adjusting them so workers did not have to drive at the peak of the rush hours. An estimated 5,000 trucks were also voluntarily kept off the freeways during rush hours, reducing further the chance for disruption.

The region’s various traffic agencies--including Caltrans, the City of Los Angeles and the CHP--all assigned high-ranking officials to a “situation room” to evaluate congestion snarls. They agreed to suspend some normal procedures in order to clear accidents and other incidents immediately. Caltrans also delayed all maintenance work.

Traffic flowed freely even at the height of rush hour because of a relatively small shift in demand--just 5%, officials said. “That 5% will do it for us,” Roper said.

Cooperation Fizzles

But efforts to continue that cooperation have drawn little response, despite a public relations campaign by Mayor Tom Bradley and downtown Los Angeles business executives to keep “the Olympic legacy” alive. Most companies are reluctant to receive truck shipments at off-hours or to make mass changes in employee schedules, and truck drivers are not eager to work odd hours without extra pay.

The situation room was closed. The Olympic cooperation between agencies has not continued.

7:01 a.m. --Varady’s computer beeps a second, chilling report from the Harbor Freeway. There is an unconscious heart attack victim stranded on the center divider after all, farther north than first reported. The officer who finds him breaks the car window and applies CPR. But the victim cannot be revived. The coroner is called.

The dead man’s car is against the center divider, out of traffic. But emergency vehicles take up room and pique the interest of passing drivers. Traffic begins to snarl on the Harbor a little earlier than usual while the coroner’s arrival is awaited. At 7:21 a.m., a SigAlert bulletin is sent to radio stations and traffic services.

7:50 a.m. --More people are headed to work now than at any time, and traffic on all major freeways is either crawling or nearly so. The Golden State is under a special strain. The CHP has just captured a motorcyclist after a lengthy chase; a truck and two cars that tangled are blocking the middle northbound lanes near Burbank Airport, and a motorist has stopped at a call-box to warn authorities that “some kind of tanker truck” is afire on the southbound side in Pacoima.

The tanker turns out to be only a small roofing-tar truck, a lucky turn of fate that means that thousands of people will make it to work on time.

They are not so lucky on the southbound Harbor Freeway in Carson. A large load of black powder--later identified as coke, a black petroleum distillation residue--has spilled from a truck, covering half a mile of freeway with a half-inch-thick blanket, blocking three lanes and the Carson Street off-ramp. Traffic bound for the Port of Los Angeles quickly backs onto the San Diego Freeway. A Caltrans incident response team is dispatched, and the third SigAlert of the day is called. The lanes won’t be reopened until nearly 10 o’clock. The Caltrans sweeper and dump truck cannot get past the traffic snarl to clean up the mess.

8:08 a.m. --The coroner finishes his work on the Harbor Freeway heart attack victim. The SigAlert is lifted.

Commuters on the San Diego Freeway have watched a new development rise on what used to be 69 acres of vacant land north of the exits to Los Angeles Airport. When finished, the Howard Hughes Center will push up to the freeway’s edge with five high-rise office buildings, containing almost 3 million square feet of space to be filled by new commuters.

That stretch of the San Diego Freeway is already among the most congested in Southern California, with a virtual all-day rush hour in both directions. Many, if not most, of the new center’s employees will try to squeeze onto the freeway every morning and afternoon.

“That kind of thing just drives us crazy,” said C. Gary Bork, chief of the traffic operations branch of Caltrans. “They want to put 5,000 more cars on there in peak hours, and it just can’t handle it.”

Little Solace

The Los Angeles City Council required the developer to spend about $10 million on new freeway ramps and street improvements. The company also must persuade about 15% of future employees to join car-pools.

But it is little solace to freeway commuters. “Someone also needs to be thinking about the fact that the Howard Hughes Center will be jamming up the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways for 10 miles downstream,” UC Berkeley’s Cervero said.

New growth has added about 1.3 million people to the region since the last census, and 5.5 million more are expected by 2010.

In southern Orange County alone, officials expect 270,000 new homes and 120 million square feet of new commercial space by the turn of the century--the equivalent in offices of more than 15 Century City developments like the high-rise complex next to the 20th Century Fox studios in West Los Angeles.

Irvine Co. has plans to develop its vast Orange County holdings, which extend from the coast south of Newport Beach well inland to the hills east of Anaheim. Up to 75,000 new employees alone would work in Irvine Spectrum, a series of high-tech business parks going up near the juncture of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways.

Swamped by Growth

Fearful of traffic, Irvine Co. requires occupants of Irvine Spectrum to help reduce congestion, and the firm also sponsors a special bus line from Santa Ana to Irvine Spectrum. Local officials plan to finance and build three new freeways through the hills of Orange County. Even so, planners expect the growth there and elsewhere in the region to swamp anyone’s ability to build new roadways.

Just to keep Southern California freeways flowing at the same crippled pace as today, Caltrans said last year that a $7-billion building program would be needed by 2005. If the money were available, it would help finance the Orange County freeways and two new freeways in San Bernardino County, widen long stretches of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways to six lanes in each direction, complete the Long Beach Freeway into Pasadena and build elevated diamond lanes along the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways. Along with other projects, it would amount to one new lane throughout the 722-mile freeway network.

Outlook Worsens

But since then, the Southern California Assn. of Governments has revised upward its prediction for future traffic. If current trends continue, the number of driving trips people make on a typical workday would climb from 40 million now to 58 million in 2010. There will be a 45% increase in daily commuters and a 16-fold jump in time spent stewing in traffic jams. Average speeds on all highways, now 35 m.p.h., would fall to 19 m.p.h.

“The projections for continued growth . . . indicate that in the next five to 20 years, the problem will become intolerable,” the agency announced in December. “Roughly 50% of the region’s travel time will be spent in delay.”

Traffic will be worse than it needs to be, most planners say, because the government association’s predictions show that new growth is likely to follow Southern California’s historical tendency to inefficient sprawl.

Sprawl is not necessarily bad; imagine if 12 million people lived and worked in Los Angeles County instead of in an area more than twice its size. But sprawl is also the reason that transportation planners say that expensive, fixed-rail systems like the Metro Rail subway are destined to make only a minor dent in traffic at best.

Statistics Questioned

The subway’s sponsor, the Southern California Rapid Transit District, says the full 18-mile line through downtown and Hollywood and out to the San Fernando Valley would remove 236,000 daily trips from the streets and freeway. But the numbers were widely questioned even before financing troubles reduced the initial project to a four-mile starter line downtown. “I don’t think it will do anything,” said Zahi H. Faranesh, the senior planner who oversaw the preparation of Caltrans’ traffic scenario.

Most commuters already live far from any of the subway or surface rail lines planned for Los Angeles. And the future population will swell most in lower-priced housing areas in the Inland Empire counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. New jobs aren’t following the flight as fast, so even 25 years from now many of those new residents will have to drive 50 miles down cluttered freeways to jobs in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Sprawl is the reason why the busiest roadway in the world, according to Caltrans, is the Ventura Freeway in Encino, far from anywhere even remotely considered a “downtown.” Some days more than 300,000 cars and trucks travel the freeway west of the San Diego Freeway interchange.

Overall, about a third of San Fernando Valley jobs--about 210,000--are held by people who live elsewhere and drive across a mountain range to get there. In the mid-1950s, most employees at Rocketdyne lived within five miles of the firm’s Canoga Park plant. Now, most new workers commute from Thousand Oaks and Agoura Hills, said Patrick Coulter, the company’s director of communications.

An additional 218,000 Valley residents leave each morning for jobs in other places. Yet another 200,000 or more commuters from other places pass through the Valley to get to work in Los Angeles and Orange counties. That puts a lot of cars on the freeways every morning and afternoon.

“Los Angeles is really a product of its history--a lack of regional planning,” Cervero said. “We have pretty much let market forces run the show, and no one has been trying to orchestrate things so there is adequate housing” close to jobs.

The first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles, wasn’t built until 1940. But the pattern of growth was established decades earlier by the most extensive, and busiest, interurban rail system in the world.

The Pacific Electric Railway “red cars” went from as far inland as Riverside to the sea with 1,100 miles of track in four counties in the 1920s, while the smaller Los Angeles Railways trolleys crisscrossed the city with an extensive array of lines.

It was an efficient transportation system that lured legions of new settlers to vast new housing tracts built along the rail lines. The rail companies--controlled by tycoon Henry Huntington--helped progress by joining in the booming land development business themselves, much as eastern trolley companies attracted riders in the late 1800s by building ballparks at the end of the line and forming professional baseball teams.

The rail skeleton set the pattern for development in Southern California--new towns and suburbs far from the center of the region in downtown Los Angeles. But as motorcars became popular, a rush began to pave new streets and highways so that homes and whole towns could be built in the vast vacant fields between rail stops. Fewer riders used the trains.

By the end of World War II, buses had replaced trains on many of the lines. Train service declined further after the rail system was purchased by interests that wanted to encourage automobile use--General Motors and major tire and gasoline companies. This group switched more of the system to buses, and many historians say the consortium helped speed the demise of the railways. In 1958, the short-lived Metropolitan Transit Authority took over the dilapidated system. In 1961, the red cars became history and Southern California was fully dependent on motor vehicles.

These days people are driving more than ever. Lower gas prices have lured some drivers back into their cars, and for decades there has been a national trend toward increased driving.

Limits on Growth

Backlash against traffic has spurred new limits on growth in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and citizen groups are complaining louder in San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

Los Angeles voters last November approved Proposition U, a referendum sponsored by two City Council members that reduces the density of future high-rise construction. While it excludes downtown and some other centers of rapid growth, city officials and transportation experts say it could make a major dent in future traffic.

The same month, Newport Beach voters sidetracked a plan by Irvine Co. for a $300-million expansion of Newport Center, the office and shopping complex overlooking Newport Harbor where the company has its corporate headquarters. The residents, including a group called Gridlock, spent only $10,000 to defeat the expansion, although Irvine Co. pumped $500,000 into the campaign and offered to spend $47 million on street improvements.

Unhappiness about traffic also led Irvine, the city that Irvine Co. erected out of the citrus groves, to elect a slow-growth majority to the City Council last June. The new faction promptly began to oppose plans for new freeways in southern Orange County.

8:50 a.m. --Speeds pick up as the morning rush eases. But then a flurry of accident reports comes in. An assortment of machine tools, including a spot-welder, falls onto the connector from the San Gabriel River Freeway to the Artesia Freeway. On the Glendale Freeway, two elderly people get safely out of a burning car, the fourth car fire of the morning.

On the Santa Monica east of Crenshaw Boulevard, the worst wreck of the day occurs for downtown commuters from Malibu and the Westside. Three cars collide, leaving one facing the wrong way. They block the two fast lanes for commuters heading downtown from Malibu and the Westside. Inbound traffic crawls from west of the San Diego until nearly 10 a.m.

9:21 a.m. --A five-car pile-up, again on the northbound Harbor, blocks the three fastest lanes. But the rush hour is over. Only the 9:30 shift gets caught behind the turmoil. The lanes are cleared after a brief disruption.

9:45 a.m. --The toll for the morning: more than 200 “incidents” occurred in the system. Luckily, the rain that threatened earlier never materialized. All in all, not such a bad day.

“It’s worse in a heat wave; people seem to break down when it’s hot,” Varady said. “And on a full moon.”

Thousands of people arrived at work aggravated and late. Something more than 2 million made it to work on time--not happy, but on time.

Varady headed off for a break. “Fridays are always light . “

. . . AND IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE

In 2010, just 23 years from now, 5 million more people are expected to live in the Southern California basin, from Ventura down the coast to San Juan Capistrano and inland to Riverside and San Bernardino.

Even if the additions now under way for the freeway system are completed, planners expect:

Half of all driving time will be spent stuck in traffic jams.

680 miles of freeway congested during afternoon rush hours (up from 301 miles today).

407 miles congested at morning rush hours.

Average rush hour speeds of 7 miles per hour on sections of the Ventura Freeway, 13 m.p.h. on the Golden State, 19 m.p.h. on the Pomona, 26 m.p.h. on the Santa Monica, 28 m.p.h. on the Harbor.

Average speed for all streets, roads and freeways to fall to 19 m.p.h., from 37 m.p.h. today.

A 25% increase in the number of driving trips per day in Los Angeles County, 57% in Orange County, 100% in San Bernardino County and 151% in Riverside County.

Sources: Southern California Assn. of Governments, Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.