Car-Pool Lane : Caltrans Agrees to Freeway Test

The director of Caltrans’ Orange County office on Monday accepted a challenge from Drivers for Highway Safety to halt traffic in a lane on the Costa Mesa Freeway long enough to determine whether the lane is too narrow to meet federal safety standards.

Keith McKean, director of Caltrans’ District 12 office, accepted the challenge during Monday’s meeting of the Orange County Transportation Commission in Santa Ana.

Albert Miranda, McKean’s spokesman, said the lane measuring probably would take place later this week, at night, during a period of low traffic volume. Miranda said Jack Mallinckrodt, secretary of Drivers for Highway Safety, will be invited to participate.

Drivers for Highway Safety is a small, Santa Ana-based organization formed after installation in late 1985 of the car-pool lane on the 55 Freeway. The group contends that the car-pool lane is hazardous because there is no barrier separating high-speed traffic using the special lane from adjacent, slower traffic. Car-pool lanes are restricted to vehicles carrying two or more people.

In December, Mallinckrodt used photographs of a measurement bar slung behind a car in an effort to prove that a section of the southbound freeway lane between the Santa Ana Freeway and Edinger Avenue was only 9 feet wide, a foot less than is required under state and federal safety guidelines, even during emergencies.

The lane, adjacent to the car-pool lane, was narrowed because of an adjacent freeway widening project associated with the rebuilding of the intersection of the Costa Mesa Freeway and the Santa Ana Freeway.

Caltrans has disputed the accuracy of the photographs, and OCTC members have referred to the whole episode as a publicity stunt.

“I’m willing to accommodate them (Drivers for Highway Safety) so that we can put this issue behind us and get on with the task of improving the freeway for the public,” McKean said Monday.

Mallinckrodt and other officials of the Drivers group complained Monday that Caltrans’ official, written reply to them on the issue of the narrow lane was “sarcastic” and never dealt with the issue of failing to meet minimum federal safety guidelines.

C. Gary Bork, Caltrans’ chief of traffic operations and the author of Caltrans’ response, told The Times on Monday that even if the narrow lane fails to meet the 10-foot federal minimum, he would not be alarmed.

“There are many other lanes throughout the Los Angeles Basin that fail to meet that standard,” Bork said. “That has never been a safety problem.” Nor, he said, have the narrower lanes ever become a political issue as they are now in Orange County. Bork said he could not recall where else in the Los Angeles Basin the narrower lanes exist.

Bork said that Caltrans could widen the lane if others adjacent to it have extra space to give up, but he said that he does not know if the space is available.

“I don’t know what else we could do,” he said.

Another assertion by Drivers for Highway Safety--that researchers for UC Irvine’s Institute of Transportation Studies deliberately falsified accident data to make the car-pool lane appear to be safer than it is--drew a sharp response Monday from the UCI group.

ITS director Will Recker said the safety organization’s critiques “selectively manipulated” ITS data and “misrepresented the (ITS) analysis so blatantly as to force this written response in an attempt to halt the dissemination of false information.”

Last year, ITS researchers concluded that the addition of the car-pool lane increased the accident rate 2% over the rate that would be expected to occur if the lane were opened to all traffic.

Last month, in a report by engineering consultant Lester P. Berriman, Drivers for Highway Safety accused ITS researchers of including, for comparison, accident data from sections of the Riverside and San Diego freeways that were scientifically inappropriate.

Berriman refused Monday to withdraw his criticism. “I’ve seen nothing to change my mind,” he said. “I still think the ITS study was politically motivated.”