In a Jam . . . and Making the Best of It

So you’re bopping in your Beamer down the Santa Ana Freeway, doing about 60, and it looks as if you’re going to make it to that important appointment on time, for once. The stereo’s on, the sun is shining, you hit the tanning parlor yesterday and--let’s face it--you’re looking great. Really. You’re rolling. The deal on the condo closes next Thursday and aren’t you glad you left Backeast, Ill., and moved to Orange County? Now THIS is the way to . . .

Uh-oh. Not again. A wave of glowing red rolls through the sea of cars up ahead, and by the time it hits the tail of the Mercedes in front of you, your foot is already hovering, ready to land on an increasingly familiar spot: the brake pedal.

You glance at the speedometer: 0. You glance at your watch: 10 minutes. No way are you going to make it.

Your heart pounds. Your breathing becomes rapid and shallow. Your jaw and shoulders tighten. Your stomach feels funny. You’re sweating.

You curse. You pound the wheel with your fist. Who are all these people on the road at 10:30 in the morning? Why don’t they go back where they came from? And why did they have to pick this particular day to ruin your life?

Nobody needs to read the paper to discover that traffic is a problem in the county. Half the residents surveyed in a recent poll called it their worst headache. At least one hospital’s stress unit has a program specifically for helping people deal with the frustrations of driving. And the experts agree that it’s going to get worse before it gets better--if it ever does.

Everybody complains about it--well, almost everybody.

Somewhere in that six-lane parking lot sit a few drivers who aren’t sweating or cursing. Drivers like Ed McClean.

Wherever he goes, whoever he’s with, McClean always offers to drive. He isn’t trying to spare anyone else the ordeal of jostling through traffic. Hardly. He wants to reserve that pleasure for himself.

“To me, the freeway’s like a grand prix,” says McClean, who spent several years commuting from his Mission Viejo home to Brentwood, about 80 miles away--and loving it.

McClean is a salesman for Merrill Lynch Realty in Mission Viejo now, where he still adds about 3,000 miles a month to the odometer of his 1986 Dodge Aries station wagon. But his fondness for the open road--or even the choked-up road --hasn’t diminished.

And there’s Lauren Jeffers of Seal Beach, who twice a day unwinds on the Garden Grove Freeway.

Or Sue Winn. At one end of her commute--Huntington Harbour--there’s a busy household with a husband and four teen-agers. At the other end--Long Beach Community Hospital--there’s a hospice program for the terminally ill, and she’s the coordinator. Although the work is rewarding, “it’s a very emotionally draining, high-stress job,” she says. As any parent of teen-agers can attest, the same can often be said for her responsibilities at home.

The pressure of being pulled in both directions left her feeling at times as if she had nothing left for herself. But with the help of a biofeedback therapist, Winn found a refuge that had been there all along: her car.

These folks aren’t likely to get to their destinations faster than the rest of us. But when they do, they’ll have considerably less wear and tear not only on their psyches but also on their bodies.

The way most of us react to a traffic jam isn’t merely unhealthy--it can be downright deadly, traffic accidents aside. There’s a relationship between clogged traffic arteries and clogged coronary arteries, according to several county doctors who are spending an increasing amount of their time trying to repair--and prevent--the damage caused by driving stress.

The typical reaction to a life crisis is known as the “fight-or-flight” response, says John Luster, a physician in Orange who emphasizes preventive medicine and stress management in his family practice.

Fight or flight came in handy in caveman days, he says, because “it could help you get away from a saber-toothed tiger. . . . But when you’re driving, that response is inappropriate. It has absolutely no function. You’re ready to do something instantly, and yet there’s absolutely nothing you can do. You’re all dressed up with no place to go.”

For many of us, Luster says, that condition becomes chronic: “It can be extremely destructive on the body. The long-term effects can be high blood pressure, clogged arteries, chronic tension or migraine headaches, chronic back problems, ulcers and digestive disorders.”

And what may seem worse to image-conscious Southern Californians, “the constant stress state,” he says, “leads to premature aging of the body.”

Luster, who drives from Laguna Beach to Orange every day, plans to follow his own advice that “the best way to deal with stress is to eliminate it, if possible.” He is moving to Orange, where his commute will be reduced to a few blocks.

But for those who can’t cut down on their driving, he recommends balancing the fight-or-flight response with its natural resolution: relaxation.

Exercise can also help keep things in balance, he says: “Regular aerobic exercise is a wonderful way not only to condition the body, to counteract the effects of sitting in the car for prolonged periods, but it’s also a marvelous stress reducer.”

But some of Luster’s patients insist they can’t possibly find time.

“I see people who drive from Woodland Hills to Santa Ana every day, people who spend a couple of hours sitting in their car every day,” he says. “They come in and they don’t feel good and they aren’t sure why, and when I start suggesting exercise and relaxation, they say: ‘I don’t have time. I spend all this time on the road.’ ”

Another problem for the hapless commuter is that when the traffic slows down, too many of us try to speed up, says Martin Brenner, a psychiatrist and medical director of the stress unit at Western Medical Center in Anaheim. The medical term for people who are always in a hurry and tend to be angry and impatient is Type A.

First identified in a 1974 study, Type A’s are statistically more likely to suffer coronary heart disease than people who don’t act that way (Type Bs).

Brenner says he can diagnose Type A behavior just by watching the cars ahead of him on the freeway. And he sees plenty of it there.

“It’s a very, very common affliction,” he says. “At least 70% of urban individuals have some element of Type A behavior, and the more demands you put on yourself, the more it comes out. The freeway is a major demand.”

When people come to Brenner for help in dealing with stresses in their lives, the first thing he wants to know is how they drive because, he says, it’s a “mirror into their overall behavior, personality and the ways that they deal with stressful situations.

“When you get into traffic, everyone, including me, feels pressure. The pressure happens to be traffic, but it could also be your boss or your wife or a financial problem or noise or almost anything else. The way we respond to that sort of pressure is reflected in the way we drive.”

So one of the first tests he administers is his own “Stress Care Driving Test.”

“The freeway, in a poetic sense, is like the path that you’re taking in life,” Brenner says. “And in life when you try to go too fast, you make mistakes, you make other people angry at you. Also, if you’re bypassing the necessary social courtesies, if you’re impatient on the freeway, you’re probably going to be impatient with your family.

“If you don’t like drivers who drive too slowly, you’re probably not going to be too happy watching your teen-ager take twice as long to mow the lawn as you could do yourself. And if you respond with hostility, just like you might on the freeway when someone’s going too slowly, it leads to a lot of arguments.”

The good news is that Type A behavior is treatable, if not curable. Brenner calls himself a “recovering Type A,” in much the same way an alcoholic is considered recovering but never recovered.

“I’ve been recovering for at least six years now,” he says. “and I’m still very recognizable as a Type A, although I’m different from the way I was before. But if you don’t work on it every day, it’s like the drinker: You’re back to drinking.”

For a Type A to change, Brenner says, “you have to put in the work and the time repetitively to create new habits.”

And one of the best places to do that is--you guessed it--the freeway. With his Stress Care Driving Program, Brenner teaches patients to slow down and relax on the freeway so they can do the same with the rest of their lives.

Brenner offers himself as a before-and-after example:

“I remember, I’d get up behind people who were going too slowly, and I’d flash my lights at them and honk and give them dirty looks. I had an exaggerated sense of self-importance. It’s like, I’m a doctor, and I’m going important places, and the rest of you are just lesser people, which is the way the Type A usually thinks about other people. I was a very hostile, impatient kind of driver.”

Nowadays, even though he drives a car that could go double the speed limit without even breaking into a sweat, Brenner putters leisurely along between his Balboa Island home and Anaheim every day, a self-confessed “freeway wimp.”

“Now, I love getting in my car,” he says. “I tell my answering service, I’m going to be in transit for half an hour; I don’t want any calls, (so) I don’t have a car phone. I drive leisurely, listen to talk radio or quiet music. I don’t tailgate. I don’t speed. I let people get ahead of me. The idea of being a wimp on the freeway is the idea that if you give in, you win. Confronting things and struggling with things are not always the ways to be successful. And freeways are not the place to be assertive.”

The new habits felt awkward at first, however, and Brenner laughs at himself when he looks back.

“For example, I never wore a seat belt. Nothing was going to happen to me. Type A’s often feel indestructible. It’s interesting, when I started putting on my seat belt, I was so time-urgent that I wouldn’t put the seat belt on before I started driving. I would be fumbling to put it on as I was moving . . . because I didn’t want to waste the time to put it on before I started the engine.”

In the beginning, the wimp approach to driving can actually be more stressful, Brenner says: “I always use the example, if you’re playing tennis and you have a serve that you like to improve, usually your serve gets worse for a while, because you’re trying to learn something new and it feels very strange. It’s the same with changing your driving behavior.

“A lot of people in our society have come to believe that nice guys finish last. I try to live my life, and I recommend to my patients, the more difficult idea that nice people finish first. It’s true, but you have to look a long way down the road.”

Ed McClean would answer to “nice guy,” but he isn’t quite what you’d call a freeway wimp. On each trip, he sees the road as territory to be conquered.

“I make a game of it. I try to outmaneuver and outthink everybody else out there. When I was driving to Brentwood, I’d get up and listen to the radio before I left, and by the time I was on the road, I knew which route to take.

“If I’m on the 5 (Santa Ana Freeway), for example, I know when to get in the right-hand lane. I take advantages of the opportunities. . . . They tell you when they’re going to add a lane, you know. They have signs, but most people don’t notice them. Where the Long Beach Freeway joins the 5, it comes in on the 1 and 2 lanes on the left. So you want to be over on the right before then.”

McClean had a phone in his car when he was driving to Brentwood regularly, as well as a dictating machine. He also made sure that his company president understood his situation.

“I asked if he could live with the fact that I might be as much as an hour late sometimes,” McClean says. “If he’d wanted me there 8:30 to 5:30 regardless, I wasn’t interested.”

When he hit a snag, he picked up the phone to call the office, then picked up the dictating handset and got to work.

“I figure, I cannot get out there and move that truck that just overturned, so why worry about it?”

McClean doesn’t have the car phone and dictating machine anymore. “They were fun, but I don’t need them,” he says. Instead, he keeps his cassette deck busy.

He has a strategy with his tapes, just as he seems to have with everything else. “Morning is a good time for motivational tapes. In the afternoons and early evenings, you want some relaxing music. But in the late evening, I switch over to the kids’ music--rock ‘n’ roll.”

And sometimes, he says, “I’ll drive for an hour and not listen to anything.”

Jeffers, a vice president at Sunwest Bank in Tustin, doesn’t believe traffic irritates us as much as we let on. She bases that opinion on what she observes every day:

“When you’re sitting in traffic, if you look at the people in the cars around you, a lot of them seem relaxed, or at least they’re not clearly agitated. They’re sipping their coffee on the on-ramp; they seem to be kind of complacent about it. Even if it’s particularly heavy, if it’s the expected traffic, it’s OK.”

In the morning, Jeffers leaves her Seal Beach home a little after the peak period, so her trip takes about an hour. In the evening, the commute hour is usually over by the time she heads home, so she can make the return trip in about half the time, without rushing.

“I use that time to unwind,” she says. “I’m usually fairly keyed up when I leave work. I have kind of a scattered job, and there’s a lot of pressure. So when I’m driving, I take time to relax. I don’t usually rush home. I use the time to adjust my thoughts, to do staff planning, outlines for projects, make lists, write letters, not physically, but in my mind. When I see people writing as they drive, it makes me crazy.”

Thanks to her biofeedback training, Winn is usually able to keep calm behind the wheel. But there are times, she admits, when relaxing takes effort.

“I can’t say traffic doesn’t bother me at all,” she says. “When I have a deadline or an appointment and I’m late, I have to really work on relaxing.

“But sometimes it’s a welcome thing when traffic jams up. I plug in a tape with the mood I’m in. And I just escape into the tape.”

Some of the tapes she listens to are related to work. Others are novels, classical music, inspirational or simply the sounds of nature. “I have one tape where you hear nothing but birds and the ocean.

“Traffic is something I can’t control,” Winn says. “And if it’s beyond my control, I let it go. I try to control what I can, which is the inside of that car, and, hopefully, myself.”

LIFE ON WHEELS

Feel like you are spending your life behind the wheel?

You are not alone.

Well, actually, when you are in your car, you probably are alone--barely 1.1% of us car-pool in Orange County.

But however isolated we may be, we are a community out there on the road. We just don’t communicate, except with bumper stickers, vanity plates and the occasional nod or gesture.

With Life on Wheels, a feature that begins today and continues each Thursday in Orange County Life, we would like to break that silence by setting up a dialogue on the experiences we share separately but together while driving. We want to know about your favorite auto mechanic. Your worst highway horror story. The time you talked your way out of a ticket. We want to find out what you drive and what it says about you.

We will explore profound mysteries, such as the reason all the radio traffic scouts always sound so $%$! cheerful as they rattle off their lists of commute-hour mishaps and catastrophes. We will look into the politics of parking and the ritual of haggling over the price of a car. And we will try to determine the median life span of those guys on motorcycles who zip between lanes when the freeway is jammed solid.

Life on Wheels columnist Jan Hofmann, a regular contributor to Orange County Life, moved here in 1983, when there were still a couple of hours most weekdays that you could stay in high gear from one end of the Costa Mesa Freeway to the other. More recently, on a desperate deadline, she brought her 10-year-old daughter along to the office so she could use the car-poolers’ fast lane.

If it has to do with driving, we will talk about it in Life on Wheels. And we would like you to join the discussion.

Send your comments to Life on Wheels, Orange County Life, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626.

HOW BAD IS ORANGE COUNTY TRAFFIC?

Nearly half (49%) of residents surveyed listed traffic as the county’s worst problem, according to the sixth annual Orange County Survey released last December.

The average freeway speed is 35 m.p.h.

In Orange County, 92% of workers commute by car, compared to a national average of 86%.

Only 1.1% of those workers car pool.

Only two miles of new freeway have been built since 1976.

The county has the highest number of registered vehicles per freeway mile in the state: 13,678, compared to 11,218 for Los Angeles County.

We also have the highest number of registered vehicles per person: 1.9 million cars for 2.2 million people. Every month, more than 15,000 new vehicles are registered in the county.

The Santa Ana Freeway is considered “severely congested” 12 to 14 hours a day.

A trip that would have taken 45 minutes in 1981 now takes an hour.

Nearly half of us (43%) drive more than 20 minutes each way to work.

HOW MUCH WORSE WILL IT GET?

The average freeway speed will drop to 19 m.p.h. by the year 2000.

By 2010, daily trips and work commutes on Southern California streets and freeways will increase by 42%.

For every 1,000 vehicles on the road today, there will be 1,420 by 2010.

For every lane-mile of congestion today, there will be 22 lane-miles of congestion in 2010. Half of travel time will be spent in delay.

Vehicle miles traveled will increase 69% in the morning peak by 2010, 71% in the evening. Because most workers begin the day at about the same time, vehicle hours of travel will increase 365% during the morning rush.

Even with the most expensive of four options proposed by the Southern California Assn. of Governments’ Regional Mobility Plan released in April--including $15.4 million for highways and $14.2 million for new transit to create 2,700 new lane miles--the average speed on Southern California freeways will drop to 27 m.p.h. by 2010, with a third of transit time spent in delay.

Sources: Southern California Association of Governments, Orange County Business Transportation Network, Orange County Annual Survey, Department of Motor Vehicles, The Economist magazine