A SPECIAL REPORT ON TRANSPORTATION : How Bad Is It? : Drivers Here Spend More Time Stuck in Traffic Than Their L.A. Counterparts

It was 7:30 on a Monday morning.

Electrical contractor Steve Milliken was stopped on a metered ramp, waiting to get on the southbound San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach.

“I usually hit a wall of cars at Beach Boulevard,” said Milliken, who was driving to a construction site in Irvine. “But the traffic is still worse in L.A.”

Milliken’s view is widespread among Orange County residents, according to public opinion surveys. But it is no longer accurate.

By some standards, Orange County’s average home-to-work commute is now worse than L.A.’s., in part because county residents spend a higher percentage of their commuting time in traffic delays than do their neighbors to the north.

Moreover, contrasted with Los Angeles County, a higher percentage of Orange County’s freeways and arterial streets are congested.

Indeed, some transportation experts say Orange County traffic already ranks with the worst in the United States.

Those conclusions by a regional planning agency and federal officials were so startling that, until recently, even Keith McKean, Caltrans’ district director in Orange County, did not think they were true.

“You always think of a drive within the Los Angeles area as being the absolute worst. . . . But in Orange County there are fewer miles of freeway and fewer arterials available, so there aren’t as many choices,” McKean said.

As early as 1984, Orange County residents spent an average of 11.5% of their commuting time driving at reduced speeds because of congestion, contrasted with 10.9% for Los Angeles County residents, according to a study by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a six-county regional planning agency. It is a small difference, but a significant one, given the greater number of freeway miles and population of Los Angeles County, experts say.

What’s more, Orange County’s ratio of freeway miles to people and cars is among the worst in the nation, despite Southern California’s reputation as the freeway capital of the world. Among the 20 fastest-growing areas of the United States, only two have had higher growth rates in the number of vehicles driving to work: Tampa-St. Petersburg and Phoenix.

And traffic in Orange County is getting worse, according to figures compiled by the agency. Indicators that were used to reach that conclusion are the hours of traffic delays, the number of highway miles in which speeds are reduced by congestion and the increasing cost of that congestion on businesses and individuals over the last several years.

One reason traffic will get worse is that the $1-billion planned widening of the Santa Ana Freeway will leave little money during the next few years for major highway projects other than the three planned tollways in southern Orange County. Even the tollways will not be fully operational for 5 to 10 years, and the Santa Ana Freeway widening may not be completed for 10 to 15 years.

Traditional traffic solutions, including building new freeways or double-decking existing routes, are expensive. Each mile of freeway construction costs about $10 million, and the funding prospects for new highways other than the three planned tollways in southern Orange County are dismal. In addition, Caltrans officials believe that opposition from homeowners and environmentalists most likely would preclude such a freeway construction boom anywhere in Southern Calilfornia.

If current trends continue and nothing is done about congestion, by 2010 a rush-hour commute that now takes 1 hour will take more than 3 hours, according to SCAG.

Although Orange County has fewer people than Los Angeles County, its smaller highway system is being asked to handle a higher rate of growth in jobs and, hence, job-related traffic, according to transportation experts.

Further, Orange County already leads the state in the number of registered vehicles per freeway mile--12,612 compared to Los Angeles County’s 10,941.

“Some areas of Los Angeles are such intense (heavily congested) hot spots that they are hotter than those in Orange County,” said Stanley T. Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission.

“But there are more hot spots in Orange County. In L.A., you have the Ventura Freeway interchange with I-405 and intersections along the Wilshire Corridor that have higher traffic volumes than what we have locally, but it’s awful here everywhere.”

Alan E. Pisarski, a Washington-based transportation adviser to the Reagan Administration and the National Academy of Sciences, said Orange County’s traffic is “certainly among the worst in the country. . . . You’ve got freeway problems and local street problems that just won’t quit.”

Pisarski and other urban planning experts say Orange County’s traffic problems stem from tremendous growth in jobs here and the inability of transportation facilities and housing opportunities to keep pace.

In this respect, Orange County is leading a national trend in which suburbs are becoming employment centers that generate more home-to-work trips from suburb-to-suburb than from the suburbs to the cities.

Orange County has not been a bedroom suburb for many years and today imports more workers each day than it exports on Southern California highways.

The Los Angeles-Orange County region may have the reputation for having the most extensive freeway system in the United States. But it actually ranks 16th among the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the number of freeway miles per million residents, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California. And when Orange County is considered separately, it ranks 17th, followed by New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Among the areas with more freeway miles per million people than Orange County are Detroit, Boston, Miami, Washington, Houston, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Diego and Dallas.

One of the biggest changes throughout the nation is in the number of vehicles driven over highways to work each day.

In Orange County, that number increased 71.7% between 1970 and 1980, more than in all other fast-growing areas except Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., and Phoenix, where highway traffic increased about 80% in both places, according to U.S. Census figures.

By some measures, Orange County’s traffic is similar to that in many of the nation’s burgeoning metropolitan regions.

In 1980, about 28.5% of U.S. commuters traveled 30 minutes or more to get to work. In Orange County in 1982, according to an annual survey directed by Mark Baldassare, a professor of social ecology at UC Irvine, 17% of the respondents said it took them 31 minutes or more to get to work. When Baldassare took a similar poll last August for The Times Orange County Edition, he found that the percentage had nearly doubled, to 31%.

Some studies show that traffic into the county from Riverside and San Bernardino counties could quadruple by the year 2010. Transportation officials say there is no way the highway system will be able to handle the load, even with construction of the eastern toll road from the Riverside Freeway to East Irvine in the mid-1990s and proposed commuter train service from Riverside to Orange County.

Still, although Orange County poll respondents reported a median commute of 21 minutes, that is less time than in many East Coast metropolitan areas. In 1980, the average work trip took 35.6 minutes in New York City, 32.1 minutes in Long Island’s Nassau-Suffolk counties and 28.5 minutes in Washington. Those figures include people who use mass transit.

It is no accident that this deterioration in traffic conditions occurred here, experts say. New highway construction was at an all-time low at the start of the 1982-86 period and is only now speeding up. Excluding migration into Orange County from elsewhere, the county’s internal traffic growth, partly the result of teen-agers reaching driving age, would be reason enough for significant, additional congestion.

A 1980 study commissioned by the County Transportation Commission concluded that it would be nearly impossible to construct a road system adequate to handle expected growth by the year 2000.

The report, by the firm of Parsons, Brinkerhoff, Douglas & Quaid, said it would take an investment of $15 billion to $20 billion, and even then the result would be a road and freeway network with average speeds 20% below 1980 levels.

ORANGE COUNTY’S WORST INTERSECTIONS

The county tracks the average daily traffic volume on any given stretch of road in Orange County. Shown here are 10 of the county’s busiest intersections and their respective daily volumes as of December, 1987.

1. Beach Boulevard and Edinger Avenue: 120,000

2. Talbert Avenue Brookhurst Street: 102,000

3. West Coast Highway and Newport Boulevard: 101,000

4. Beach Boulevard and McFadden Avenue: 99,000

5. Bristol Street South and Irvine Avenue: 99,000

6. Beach Boulevard and Warner Avenue: 97,000

7. Harbor and Newport boulevards: 94,000

8. jamboree Boulevard and East Coast highway: 91,000

9. Beach Boulevard and Westminster Avenue: 91,000

10. Edinger Avenue and Golden West Street: 88,000

ORANGE COUNTY’S WORST BOTTLENECKS

Shown here are 10 of the worst bottlenecks on Orange County’s freeway system. They are not ranked by severity of congestion because comparative traffic volumes for each are not available.

1. State 91 east at 1-5

2. 1-5 south-State 91 east

3. State 91 west-State 55 south

4. State 57 south-1-5 south

5. State 57 south-State 22 west

6. State 22 east-1-5/State

7. State 22 east-State 55 north

8. 1-5 north-State 55 north

9. 1-5 south-State 55 south

10 1-5 north-1-405 north