Putting on the Brakes : San Marcos Moves to Ease Growing Traffic Problems

Creeping along California 78 on his daily commute to work, Emmett Phillips sees a disturbing glimpse of the future, a view that reminds him of the traffic horrors made famous in Los Angeles.

“At times, it’s coming to that point,” said Phillips, personnel manager for Singer Electronics System Division in San Marcos. “It’s much more congested than it was two years ago, three years ago. (But) it hasn’t reached the situation where you stop dead yet.”

Unlike others who merely complain, Phillips has been swept up in San Marcos’ new effort to fight gridlock on the roads by requiring employers to actively encourage employee use of car pools, van pools and staggered working hours under the county’s first traffic control ordinance.

Chagrined by corporate and commuter voluntary efforts that have failed to control traffic, other cities across the county are following San Marcos’ example and beginning to develop traffic management plans of their own. Like San Marcos, all will consider statutes that would require the participation of the large employers in their area.

“With the way the city is growing, we’re going to see traffic getting to the point of traffic gridlock,” said Amy Foster, who coordinates San Marcos’ Peak Hour Traffic Management program. “What we’re doing, instead of waiting for that to happen, is we’re taking a pro-active approach. As hard as it may seem to do, we’re trying to change people’s way of thinking a little bit.”

Though business leaders appear to be taking a cooperative attitude toward such measures, experts with experience in traffic management predict that progress will be measured in small increments and note that traffic management is only one part of the solution to the county’s growing traffic gridlock.

“I personally think it’s difficult to get people to change their behavior,” said Lee Hultgren, director of transportation for the San Diego Assn. of Governments. “They want to be able to drive when they want to drive, and where they want to drive. If it’s convenient for them to pick up somebody along the way, that’s fine too. But they want to have their cars available whenever they want to use them.”

“This is a motherhood, apple pie, American flag kind of program,” Foster said. “Everybody knows it’s good, but no one does it until they absolutely have to.”

According to the 1980 U.S. Census, 63.8% of San Diego County commuters drove to work alone. Another 17.4% were part of car pools, 9.9% walked, 3.2% used public transit and 1.1% rode bicycles.

A 1983 Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce survey of 20 large downtown businesses found that 55% of their employees drove to work alone, with 24% using car pools, 12% taking public transit and 5% being dropped off.

San Marcos is just one of the cities that believe they can no longer remain idle while growth swamps their major thoroughfares in a sea of single-occupant vehicles.

At the request of a panel of North County mayors, the cities of Escondido, Vista, Oceanside and Carlsbad are meeting with San Marcos to come up with traffic control plans designed to spread traffic control benefits to the entire congested region.

Farther south, the San Diego City Council is about to hire a consultant to map out a plan for the city’s major employers. Two weeks ago, the county government agreed to look into ways of controlling traffic created by the 13,000 employees at offices countywide.

The local efforts coincide with a similar Los Angeles-area plan approved Dec. 11 that will require 8,000 businesses to offer ride-sharing incentives to 1.5-million commuters in the four-county South Coast Air Basin.

Breaking Old Habits

In May, the San Marcos City Council passed an ordinance requiring businesses with more than 10 employees to participate in programs designed to break old commuting habits during the peak traffic hours of 6:30-7:45 a.m. and 4:30-5:45 p.m. Surveys show that 82% of the town’s commuters drive to work alone, Foster said.

San Marcos’ carrot-and-stick approach offers giveaways to employees who switch to car pools, van pools, bicycles or walking, and the possibility of fines for companies that do not comply with the ordinance.

Under the terms of the ordinance, which was developed by a task force that included business and government leaders, all employers and business complexes must conduct surveys of their workers’ driving habits and turn in the results to Foster. Businesses with 10 to 49 employees must offer informational programs on transportation alternatives.

Businesses with 50 or more employees must develop traffic management programs, including the promotion of car pools, van pools, bicycle-riding, public transit subsidies, and staggered hours or flex-time scheduling.

The program, which also applies to city, school district and Palomar College workers, projects a 45% reduction in the number of peak-hour vehicle trips over the next four years. While businesses are not required to reduce their employees’ total number of trips, they must participate in the promotion of alternative transportation. For example, the companies can provide preferential parking to car poolers, showers and locker rooms for bicyclists and flexible hours, Foster said.

The plan, Foster said, is designed to give employees a less-expensive and less-troublesome commute, while helping to clear city streets. Employers might receive the side benefit of a happier, more productive work force.

The plan is working in Alameda County in the booming, former agricultural town of Pleasanton, which in 1984 became the first U.S. city to establish the traffic plan. San Marcos’ ordinance is modeled on Pleasanton’s initiative.

In 1985, all but five of Pleasanton’s 34 major employers met the first-year goal of reducing auto trips by 15%. In 1986, only seven of 40 large businesses failed to meet the second-year goal of 25% reductions, said Gail Gilpin, the city’s transportation systems manager.

Though gains in the actual number of people choosing new transportation methods were modest, Gilpin’s figures show that peak-hour traffic has been reduced 26% over what it would be if there were not ride-sharing incentives.

Employers have found staggered and flexible work hours the most attractive alternative “because it’s inexpensive to implement, the employees like it and they achieve a great deal of their goal that way,” Gilpin said. Ride-sharing arrangements were the next most popular choice, she said.

“One of the impressive things about this ordinance is that employers have seen how getting involved in their employees’ commute can have direct benefits for the business,” Gilpin said. “The employees are tardy less often, they tend to be more productive and they tend to have better morale. Employees see this as a benefit.”

Spurred by Ordinance

As coordinator of Singer Co.’s traffic program, Phillips represents San Marcos’ largest private employer, with 640 workers. Though he sees no direct cost savings for Singer, Phillips endorses the program, which he believes could increase the morale of employees as they arrive for work each morning at 7 a.m.

“I guess it would affect all of us if we could get in a car and not get in a gridlock situation,” Phillips said. “It would be less stressful.”

Phillips concedes that his company would not have taken on such a project without being spurred by a mandatory city ordinance--an element that backers of similar plans also consider crucial.

“I don’t imagine that we would have, on our own, offered a lot of incentives to deal with the traffic problem,” Phillips admitted. “I think the ordinance has helped us to realize that, and to help us create incentives.”

“To date, the voluntary program hasn’t worked,” agreed Manny Demetre, director of the Commuter Computer, which has placed just 68,140 people in ride-share arrangements since its inception in 1975. “I’m fairly confident that they’ll have to go with some form of regulatory program.”

Despite a general climate of optimism, San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau is already disappointed at the pace of business efforts to control traffic in a town making the transition from a predominantly agricultural economy to one increasingly dominated by a mix of small and moderately sized commercial ventures, that will be joined in 1990 by a branch of San Diego State University.

“The rest of the county is waiting to see what we do and I’m just impatient by nature. I don’t like delays,” said Thibadeau, who promised to start lobbying major businesses for more progress after Jan. 1. “As far as I’m concerned, the program was initiated in July and this is December, and we haven’t seen anybody do anything yet.”

Watching Closely

Watching the San Marcos experiment closely are other cities that must decide how to involve businesses in developing programs and whether to require their participation once plans are established.

“It’s in their best interest too,” said Jim Hagaman, Carlsbad’s research and analysis manager. “How do you get your supplies in and out with the streets all congested? How do you get your people in and out.”

Business leaders want to know where they fit in. “Business is going to be interested and wants to participate in the program,” said Paul Schwartz, executive vice-president of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce. “Not only in terms of the implementation but in terms of the design of it . . . What’s in it for business as well as the city?”

“I’m reluctant to say whether we’d endorse it or not, but we have certainly been supportive of ride-share incentive plans and traffic management,” said Dorothy Migdal, vice president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce’s local division.

Voluntary--and to some extent, compulsory--ride-sharing programs are not new to Southern California, a region considered more dependent on the automobile than any other in the country. Perhaps the most famous example is the cooperative effort put together to reduce congestion on Los Angeles freeways during the 1984 Olympic Games.

In San Diego county, 600 employers and the military participate in the Commuter Computer’s voluntary car-pool programs.

Since 1981, federal and state law has required large businesses to submit plans to their air pollution control authorities detailing how they would reduce traffic in the event of a severe smog crisis. No so-called “Stage 2” situation has been called in San Diego, but businesses could be forced to implement their plans in the event of such a situation, as has been the case in Los Angeles.

A more far-reaching plan was approved Dec. 11 by the South Coast Air Quality Management District in an effort to reduce smog in the four counties around Los Angeles. The plan requires employers with 100 or more workers to offer incentives promoting the use of car pools and public transit.

Despite the organizational efforts, progress, which is dependent on heavy promotion and marketing efforts, can crawl as slowly as rush-hour traffic on Interstate 8. The number of car poolers in Pleasanton actually fell by 3% between 1985 and 1986, as the price of gasoline dropped and new car sales increased.

The city’s American Telephone and Telegraph Co. office--which won a national award for its efforts--showed just small gains during the same period of time. In 1985, 709 of the firm’s 2536 employees used car pools or van pools. In 1986, 733 of 3257 employees used the service. The number of bicyclists rose from 13 to 34 during the same period, while the number of walkers increased from 12 to 31.

“It’s not like selling transit in San Francisco, where you have trains and buses and so forth,” Gilpin said. “This is still successful in an suburban setting where there aren’t that many options to market.”

With its work force growing quickly, Pleasanton opened a bus system last year, is planning a new rail system, has added miles of bike paths and is proposing freeway interchange improvements. In San Diego, similar improvements were endorsed by voters Nov. 3 when they approved Proposition A, which increased the sales tax to raise $2.25 billion for transportation projects.

With the specter--real or imagined--of Los Angeles-style traffic jams on the horizon, San Diego County cities are ready to try other alternatives.