Survey Finds Typical Driver on Solo Run to Irvine Job

Driving alone, Reynaldo Sacayanan commutes 26 miles to work each day in Irvine from his home in La Puente.

He travels four freeways: the Pomona, the Orange, the Santa Ana and the Costa Mesa. Life is fine until he hits the Santa Ana Freeway, where commute congestion leaves him sitting in his barely moving car each morning, “bothered and waiting.”

Sacayanan, an engineering draftsman at Van Dell & Associates, has much in common with other drivers on the county’s freeways, according to the results of a mail-in traffic survey conducted in May.

- Irvine, home to dozens of corporations, is by far the most likely destination for Orange County drivers, according to the survey which was commissioned by the Transportation Corridor Agencies to help in designing three proposed freeways for the southern part of the county.

- Most motorists on county freeways are going to or from work.

- And four out of five times, they’re alone in their cars.

“This confirmed a whole lot of information we suspected,” TCA spokeswoman Susan Marzec said of the survey, the results of which were released Thursday. The study “turned theory into fact.”

Response Frequency of 30%

The survey did offer one surprise: Of 400,000 surveys distributed, 125,000 were completed and returned. Most such mail-in surveys show an average response rate of about 15%, but the rate in Orange County was more than 30%, said Ed Regan, vice president of Wilbur Smith & Associates, the San Francisco firm that conducted the survey.

“That shows a lot of perceived need for the (freeway) projects,” Regan said.

The consulting firm next month will make public its recommendations on traffic capacity and ramp locations for the planned freeways.

County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, chairman of both the Orange County Transportation Commission and the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor’s board of directors, said he is “mesmerized” by the county’s high response rate.

“It proves to all of us once again,” Riley said Thursday, “that Orange County does have a personality all its own.”

Some other survey findings:

- Orange County drivers don’t like to car-pool. According to the survey, 81% of the cars on the county’s freeways contain just one person, creating an average of 1.27 persons per vehicle. Regan said this is lower than the national average, which some estimates have placed at about 1.4 persons per vehicle.

- Most freeway trips in the county are overwhelmingly related to work or business. During peak hours--7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6 p.m.--80.7% of drivers on the road are making such trips. The average rate of work-related trips during all hours is 68.7%.

- The county’s No. 1 destination for freeway travelers is Irvine. More than 342,000 trips are made to there each weekday. The next most popular destination, Santa Ana, isn’t even close, with 116,347 trips made every weekday.

Margin for Error Hard to Figure

Regan said that because some of the survey questions had an infinite number of possible responses, a margin of error was “very hard to calculate.”

But he said the survey’s sample size was “more than adequate to measure traffic patterns” and made the study statistically valid.

The survey was conducted by distributing response cards at 60 freeway ramps in the county. Because the proposed new freeways are to be in the south county, the northwest area of the county--from Huntington Beach to Buena Park--wasn’t polled.

One planned freeway, through the Eastern Transportation Corridor, will extend from the Riverside Freeway to the Santa Ana Freeway in East Tustin and East Irvine.

The proposed Foothill Corridor freeway would link the eastern corridor with the San Diego Freeway, near San Clemente. And the San Joaquin Hills Corridor freeway would run from the Corona del Mar Freeway near UC Irvine to the San Diego Freeway near San Juan Capistrano.

Construction of the San Joaquin Hills Corridor freeway, the first to be built, is scheduled to begin at the end of 1989.

HOW WE DRIVE

The four locations that are the destination or starting point for the greatest number of motorists are:

Location Motorists ALL HOURS Irvine 342,354 Santa Ana 116,347 North Orange County 80,573 Laguna Hills 79,439

Location Motorists PEAK HOURS (7-9 a.m.; 3-6 p.m.) Irvine 83,554 Santa Ana 39,392 North Orange County 29,356 Laguna Hills 28,035

Source: Wilbur Smith Associates for the Transportation Corridor Agencies