Poll Finds No Clamor for Relief : Most L.A. Commuters Shrug Off the Traffic

If you spend two and three hours a day slogging up and down the freeways, you probably do not want to know this.

Most Los Angeles County commuters who responded to a tax-payer-funded survey reported that they are not suffering significantly from traffic congestion.

The Santa Ana-based Wirthlin Group, a nationally recognized polling firm, has found a “fairly tolerant attitude towards traffic” in Los Angeles County, with two out of three commuters describing their drives as not congested or only somewhat congested. Only 27% of daily commuters describe their drive as “very” or “extremely” congested.

‘Take It in Stride’

“Apparently, while many voters are suffering because of transportation problems, the majority are not or perhaps take it in stride by force of habit,” the pollsters reported.

Those remarks do not attempt to reflect attitudes in the region as a whole. They are confined to Los Angeles County, as required by the county’s Transportation Commission, which paid for the poll. Not included were the thousands of motorists living in surrounding counties who make some of the most horrendous commutes.

Even within Los Angeles County, I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, said the Wirthlin poll results could be interpreted another way: That three out of five commuters say they experience congestion.

The significance of the poll is that political leaders and transportation planners may have a difficult time persuading voters to approve higher taxes for highway and mass transit improvements if the bulk of the commuters are not pleading for relief from congestion.

Another intriguing aspect of the Wirthlin poll findings is that they do not particularly surprise some transportation planners. The experts know there is a long, but seldom-discussed trail of data showing the typical commute in the Los Angeles area has not changed appreciably in decades.

In Los Angeles County, almost half the daily work trips are still under 10 miles; 71% under 20 miles, according to the new commission survey, which was conducted in May. That appears comparable to 20 years ago when a California Transportation Department study found the average drive to work for this region was slightly over 10 miles in Los Angeles and neighboring counties.

Average Unchanged

Also, the average time it takes someone to get to work is essentially unchanged. It was about 22.1 minutes in the 1967 Caltrans survey. It was found to be 22.5 minutes in a similar 1984 study conducted by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a long-range regional planning agency.

Recent surveys, including the new commission poll, show about the same thing: 60% or more of commuters still have one-way drives of less than 30 minutes. Forty percent or more are less than 20 minutes.

“It’s remained relatively constant,” acknowledged David Roper, deputy director of the Los Angeles regional Caltrans office.

Even SCAG’s much-quoted predictions that freeways will slow to a crawl in the next 10 to 20 years have included often-overlooked and somewhat confounding forecasts that the average work trip will still only take 23 or 24 minutes in 20 years.

How can this be?

No one is entirely sure. There are a variety of theories.

Some officials say that the impact of traffic increases has been partly absorbed by road widenings, extensions, re-stripings, improved freeway interchanges, the addition of metered on-ramps and more sophisticated traffic signals.

Human nature has also come into play.

“Our ability to adapt is pretty overwhelming,” said Judith Hamerslough, a senior transportation planner for SCAG.

Leave Earlier

Commuters ferret out less-congested routes on freeways and surface streets, officials say. They leave home a little earlier and stay at the office a little later to avoid the rush-hour crunch.

But the most effective regulator of congestion, some transportation experts contend, is decentralization or sprawl of housing and jobs, which continues to create new opportunities for people to change one or the other. More than one in five commuters in Los Angeles and surrounding counties have already moved or changed jobs to shorten their commute, a recent SCAG survey found.

Peter Gordon, a USC professor of urban planning who has studied the region’s transportation patterns, argues that “the bottom line is that decentralization is the solution. . . .”

“The increase in suburb-to-suburb (commuting) is what keeps the whole thing from going crazy,” he said.

However, many transportation planners warn that the region is approaching a kind of precipice in traffic conditions--where congestion could get much worse fast. Roper said more people are experiencing congestion because their ability to adapt is becoming restricted. Rush-hour commutes have stretched to six hours a day in some areas, and “the freedom of choice is getting less and less,” he said.

Martin Wachs, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, agrees.

At the Brink

“When you’re near the capacity of freeways and you add just a few more cars, it gets much worse,” Wachs said. “A lot of us in the field are concerned because we see ourselves at the brink of that serious problem.”

However, some of the doomsday data has been challenged, notably a SCAG projection that average rush-hour speeds will drop from the current 35 m.p.h. to about 19 m.p.h. in the year 2010.

The prediction, SCAG officials acknowledge, was based on an incomplete set of assumptions. It does not account for all of the transportation projects expected to be built, and it made no adjustment for the likelihood that jobs will continue to follow housing into newly developing areas, as they did in Orange County after a residential building boom in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Hamerslough, the SCAG transportation planner, said she does not believe the 19-m.p.h. scenario will ever happen, but she complains that it is hard to get those who keep using the number--including the news media--to listen to caveats.

Some of those searching for politically saleable ways to deal with traffic say there is a danger of overstating the problem to voters when surveys show most commuters are not suffering significantly.

‘Government Hysterics’

“People will think that it’s just more government hysterics,” said Sepulveda Democrat Richard Katz, chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee and one of those trying to craft a highway and mass transit gas tax increase measure for the November ballot.

Katz said rather than generating dire predictions, officials should present voters with a clear, step-by-step plan, complete with construction deadlines, that will list the specific highway and transit improvements they will receive from a tax increase.

Katz, who is among the state and local officials assessing the results of the commission’s survey, said short and apparently tolerable commutes are just part of the political problems facing transportation leaders as they struggle with the need for more funds for freeways and mass transit.

Three-fourths of Los Angeles County voters said more should be spent on streets and roads, but two-thirds said the money would be available if government spent what it already has more efficiently, the commission poll found.

Improve Streets

Forty-eight percent of the voters said they would support a tax increase to improve streets and freeways, but that support appeared weak, the pollsters said.

Generally, voters have higher priorities than traffic. While the commission poll and surveys by The Times have found a significant constellation of concerns related to traffic congestion, overdevelopment and smog, they are eclipsed by worries about crime and drugs.

In addition, concern over traffic varies depending on location and socioeconomic status. It is of the most concern to higher-income white residents of the suburbs, particularly those in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside. Blacks and lower-income residents of the central area of the county are so overwhelmingly troubled by crime that traffic scarcely measures as a problem.

Also, more than 40% of the voters do not even commute to work, the commission poll found. When election time rolls around, this large block of retirees, homemakers, students and those who do not commute to work for various reasons will rank fairly low on what the pollsters call the traffic “misery index.”

A NEW LOOK AT TRAFFIC ‘MISERY’

A new taxpayer-funded survey of attitudes of Los Angeles County voters toward traffic has found most are not as miserable as conventional wisdom would suggest. Among the findings:

HOW MANY Only 58% of the voters commute to work. The remainder are unemployed, retired or do not have to commute to their jobs. HOW CONGESTED Of those who do commute, two-thirds indicate that they are not suffering significantly--33% said their drive is not congested and 34% described it as only somewhat congested. Just 15% said they experience very congested conditions, and only 12% said their drive is extremely congested. HOW FAR 45% of those who are employed drive less than 10 miles to work; 71% less than 20 miles. Just 21% commute more than 20 miles. TRIPS TO WORK 51% of those with jobs take freeways to work. 41% do not use freeways and 7% do not commute. Source : Los Angeles County Transportation Commission poll