Readers Offer 64 Ways to Speed Traffic

MEMO TO: Orange County Transportation Commission members.

FROM: Life on Wheels.

RE: Traffic solutions.

Feel free to leave the office early today. Life on Wheels readers have done some of your work for you.

That’s right. Remember a couple of weeks ago when you started asking the public to suggest 100 solutions, large or small, general or specific, for the county’s near-perpetual traffic jam?

Yes, we know you’re not going to start sorting through that pile of letters you received until early in the new year. But we’re going to give you a head start, because Life on Wheels readers have already come up with 64 solutions (not counting duplications). That means the job is nearly two-thirds done.

So go ahead. Take in a movie. Do some shopping. Or even if you go straight home, at least you’ll be able to avoid the peak traffic hours. Hey, there’s another one. Make that 65 solutions. . . .

Of course, we don’t claim that every one of these ideas is feasible. That’s your job--so maybe you should stick around for a few more minutes, after all. Some are complex, big-ticket answers, while others call for nothing more than a little common sense. Many of the suggestions are contradictory. And a few are, well, let’s just call them unique.

The most frequent suggestion by far? Mass transportation, particularly a monorail or train system running down the center or alongside the county’s major freeways.

Many readers also proposed synchronizing traffic signals on surface streets, an idea you folks at the Transportation Commission have already taken action on with the Beach Boulevard super-street project.

Christine M. Burton of Huntington Beach sent in the most solutions per capita, 18 in all. Some of them seem serious enough. Others, we pray, are not (see No. 16, for example).

We will start our countdown with Burton’s list:

* 1. Severely limit the influx of population.

* 2. Limit truck traffic between 6 and 9 a.m. and 4 and 7 p.m. daily. (Also suggested by several other readers.)

* 3. Stagger the working hours to permit around-the-clock job access.

* 4. Go to the 4-day, 10-hour workday. Have one group work Monday through Thursday and another group work Tuesday through Friday.

* 5. Encourage those who can to work from home via computers and modems.

* 6. Encourage people to work closer to where they live or move closer to where they work.

* 7. Upgrade roads paralleling the major freeways.

* 8. Synchronize and computerize the entire traffic signal network (also suggested by several other readers).

* 9. Develop a “BART-type transportation system” to convey people to areas with high concentrations of businesses, such as the Irvine Industrial Complex.

* 10. Encourage business park developers to locate sites near residential areas with the majority of employees.

* 11. Major companies should consider moving to less-populated states.

* 12. Write to all your friends in the East and Midwest and tell them that the “Big One” will be hitting Southern California soon. It is hoped that this information will discourage new migration.

* 13. When you spot an “I NY” bumper sticker, stop the person and ask them to leave California at once and take someone with them.

* 14. DO NOT TELEVISE THE ROSE PARADE, especially to areas with 40 below zero temperature when it’s 75 in Pasadena. “Televising of the Rose Parade has been responsible for more people moving to Southern California than any other single event,” Burton says.

* 15. Enact a law that only x number of people can live in an x -square-mile area. Make this retroactive to 1978 . . . and send everyone who moved here since 1978 back to where they came from. (We assume you’ll be taking over the column then, Christine, as your friendly local Life on Wheels columnist would be exiled under this proposal.)

* 16. (This is the one I warned you about.) Pray for the big earthquake to come quickly. This will guarantee that the state will be cleaned out of those extra people who are crowding out the rest of us.

* 17. Encourage people to go back to their original states by requiring a 9-month waiting period to obtain a job in California.

* 18. Encourage employers to provide vans for use by employees. (For van pools, we assume, and not to haul recent arrivals to the state line.)

“I realize that some of these suggestions are far-fetched, facetious and smack of sarcasm,” Burton says. “But when you see your native state being ruined by overpopulation, you start to question the whole concept of dividing the country into states in the first place.” (Somehow I could have guessed she was a native.)

The second-longest list, with 13 suggestions, comes from the employees in the Autonetics office at Rockwell International in Anaheim. They commute to work from as far away as Fontana, Corona, Perris and Pomona. Only one idea--banning trucks during rush hour--was a duplicate from Burton’s list. Here are the others:

* 19. At traffic accidents, have some method to direct traffic and keep it moving.

* 20. Have minimum speeds marked for each lane. (I like the optimistic assumption here that we might be able to maintain them.)

* 21. Have signs for inclines reminding people to maintain their speeds.

* 22. Have signs saying, “Slow traffic keep right.”

* 23. Have an evacuation route for the Riverside Freeway other than the bottleneck from Green River to Weir Canyon roads. Lengthen Weir Canyon and/or Santa Ana Canyon Road.

* 24. Have meters placed at all on-ramps through Corona to handle peak traffic hours.

* 25. Establish emergency response teams for accidents.

* 26. Have radio stations like they have at Los Angeles International Airport to report accidents or hazards ahead.

* 27. Remove car-pool and diamond lanes. (Also suggested by another reader.)

28. Build a Disneyland-style monorail down the center of the freeways to major points for commuters. Have a station placed every 5 to 10 miles. (Also suggested by six other readers.)

* 29. On surface streets, have signs saying, “Left turns on green arrow only or when there is no oncoming traffic.”

* 30. Have a route through, or under, Saddleback.

S. A. Constantino Jr. of Tustin is the author of solution No. 31, on which he enclosed a mountain of background material we will be forwarding along to the OCTC. Constantino said he “long ago concluded that the picture telephone would eventually be the only way to put an end to ‘hopeless’ traffic congestion. . . . I was certain that if enough riders stayed at home to do their office work . . . while maintaining the necessary liaison over their own picture phone with fellow employees . . . there would then be enough room for the cars still out there to move at their intended, reasonable speeds.”

R. Scott Kuhns of Irvine sent in several suggestions:

* 32. Better driver education, teaching drivers to use the fast lane for passing only, to use turn signals and accelerate quickly when entering freeways, among other things.

* 33. Build new freeways at night whenever possible. Ditto for highway maintenance. “Even if this increases construction costs it has to be cheaper than the time and money wasted in traffic jams,” Kuhns says.

* 34. Double-deck the freeways. (Also suggested by another reader.)

* 35. Get private business into freeway planning.

* 36. Ask the Japanese to come up with a solution.

Vivian Frerichs of Mission Viejo says Orange County should try reversible traffic lanes, such as those on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, to accommodate morning and evening commuters. That’s 37.

* Idea No. 38 is from Jeffrey A. Masterson of Laguna Hills. He suggests that drivers with car phones call the Caltrans 530 AM radio station (now airing a perpetual recording) with information on congestion and clearing. And he also sneaks in suggestion No. 39.

“Until all the freeways and side streets are video-monitored, I think this would be the best possible method for a constant update of the rapidly changing highway system in Southern California.”

But Masterson wasn’t finished. He wrote again with more suggestions:

* 40. Put arrows after street numbers indicating whether they are getting larger or smaller in each direction.

* 41. Have a special lane for motorcyclists.

* 42. Have a walled-off bicycle lane on freeways.

* 43. Have more one-way streets. (Also suggested by another reader.)

* 44. Stuart Weber of Santa Ana says that because many wrecks are caused by unsafe lane changes, we should post signs on the freeway telling drivers “to make lane changes with extreme caution.”

* 45. From H. M. White of Newport Beach: Have on-ramp meters severely delayed whenever the flow on a freeway drops below 20 or 30 m.p.h.

* 46. Alan Sime of Orange, however, suggests eliminating those meters altogether.

Michael Lawrence Kennington sent in a map with our 47th suggestion, adding a lane to the northbound Orange Freeway between the Garden Grove and Santa Ana freeways, thus eliminating a bottleneck caused by merging traffic at that point.

* 48. From H. Warren White of Balboa Island, and an elaborate one it is: “Develop a flatbed truck and trailer that can carry a very small car (preferably electric-powered) crosswise. Provide loading and unloading docks every 10 miles or so . . .. Run these truck-trains on the diamond lanes on our freeways.”

Nishan Nercessian of Westminster has two much simpler ideas:

* 49. Have the names of the streets high above at the intersections and lighted.

* 50. Also, show the name of the coming street . . . by a sign about 150 feet before the intersection.

Carl E. Joyce of South Laguna also sent in two suggestions, one general and one specific.

* 51. Joyce suggests we give the Costa Mesa Freeway car-pool lane a fair test, trying it once with all four lanes open, then with three lanes plus a car-pool lane. “That’s the only way to find out which works better,” he says.

* 52. Joyce also recommends moving the meter on the Sand Canyon on-ramp to the southbound Santa Ana Freeway to allow drivers room to accelerate before merging with freeway traffic.

* 53. Phil Perry of Orange thinks drivers should be required to leave at least four or five car lengths between vehicles on the freeway. (Also suggested by another reader.)

Harlan Laurence Meredith, also of Orange, has three suggestions for congested areas:

* 54. Pedestrian overpasses in the middle of every block.

* 55. No parking on through streets.

* 56. More city parking lots.

* 57. From Helen F. Raymond of Lake Elsinore: “Put up signs over the freeways at least 3 miles from any major turnoff indicating the lanes necessary for the split.”

From James Miyamoto of Fountain Valley, three ideas:

* 58. Require employees of large companies to car-pool during peak hours. Give tax breaks and insurance cuts as incentives.

* 59. Have directories available so that drivers who want to car-pool can more easily find others traveling in the same direction at the same time.

* 60. If you can’t increase the number of people in your vehicle, then reduce the size of your vehicle.

* 61. Hire landscape architect Lawrence Halperin, who did such a nice job on Interstate 280 near San Francisco, to do the San Joaquin Hills Corridor, suggests Carol Chapman of Corona del Mar.

* 62. Build a truck freeway in the flood-control channels already established all over Southern California, suggests Jack K. Carney of Irvine.

* 63. Because interstate highways are also defense highways, as established by the Federal Highway Act of 1956, we should redirect some of the billions going for defense into transportation, according to David P. McCosker of Irvine.

* 64. McCosker also suggests we try a high-speed surface transportation system similar to the one he rode at Expo ’86 in Vancouver, Canada, as an up-to-date replacement for Southern California’s old Pacific Electric red cars.

We’ll be exploring some of these ideas in greater depth here during the new year. In the meantime, OCTC, they are all yours.