‘Relief’ Specialists CLEAR Southland Freeway Traffic

About 15,000 feet above Los Angeles, Bill Ward and Mike Werner rush to get the city to work on time.

Slipping through smoggy morning skies in their California Highway Patrol chopper, the two officers scan the snarls that paralyze stretches of the city’s busiest freeways, their eyes hunting for the impediments that can transform the freeways into linear parking lots.

Three miles below and nearly 10 miles west, CHP Officer Tyrone Johnson launches a similar hunt--his from the heart of the snarls.

“You can have a minor accident or one stalled car,” said Johnson, his patrol car speeding along the shoulder of the northbound San Diego Freeway toward a disabled taxi. “If we don’t hurry up and get to it, it can back up the freeway for miles. . . . That’s why we can’t take a break. If we do, there could be some serious problems.”

For three hours a day, Monday through Friday, these officers are in the vanguard of Operation CLEAR--Clearing Lanes Efficiently and Rapidly--the CHP’s latest assault on Los Angeles traffic congestion.

Operation CLEAR is a six-month pilot program aimed at locating and removing traffic obstructions on targeted portions of the San Bernardino, Santa Ana and San Diego freeways.

Its success hinges on the chopper, 16 to 18 patrol cars and motorcycles, a fleet of tow trucks and CHP officers such as Werner, Ward and Johnson, “congestion relief” specialists who do little else for three hours but pinpoint and remove traffic obstructions.

During shifts that last from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., the officers must ensure that streams of tens of thousands of cars, trucks and motorcycles flow smoothly.

Response Time

And when something disrupts that traffic flow, they want to find it within 10 minutes.

“Response time is so important because every minute of response time translates into miles of back-up and millions of dollars in time wasted in the middle of traffic,” said Mike Maas, a CHP spokesman. “That’s why 10 minutes is our targeted maximum response time.”

According to CHP statistics for July, the Operation CLEAR ground units responded in an average of 6 minutes, 20 seconds to 791 impediments on the selected freeways. Officers ran across another 959 incidents without notification.

Traffic officials said the agency didn’t gauge response time before Operation CLEAR, but admitted that it needed improvement.

“CLEAR has gone a long way in improving response time,” said Dale Perron, a transportation engineer for the California Department of Transportation. “Before, it would take officers a lot longer than 10 minutes to get to a problem on the freeway.”

Although freeway traffic has yet to flow as smoothly as it did during the 1984 Olympics, some believe this effort to accelerate response time has cut freeway congestion.

‘Big Difference’

“I have a noticed a big difference in clearing time,” said Jim Thornton, a radio traffic reporter for the Metro Traffic Control news service. “(The CHP officers) are moving obstructions faster, and I see the tow trucks getting there faster.”

To better response time, pilots and ground units have developed distinct methods of locating traffic impediments.

While Johnson undauntingly cruises the freeway shoulders and side streets that skirt his beat--the stretch of the San Diego Freeway between Manchester Avenue and Imperial Highway, near Los Angeles International Airport--the chopper pilots rely heavily on intuition.

“It’s instinctive,” said Ward as he guided the helicopter over a congested strip of the Santa Monica freeway. “If you chase calls (from the dispatcher), you’ll fall behind real quick. We try to do this in a pro-active mode, go to the areas where we anticipate problems.”

The pilots, who also monitor the Pasadena, Santa Monica, Harbor and Golden State freeways, said radio traffic reports are vital to their air search, too.

Shared Information

“We pass information back and forth with them (radio reporters),” Werner said. “It’s beneficial for both of us and the radio stations. We’ll check out something they may have heard about and vice versa.”

Although he often discovers accidents and stalled cars by cruising the freeways, Johnson depends primarily on a central dispatch center located in the CHP’s Hollywood office to alert him to obstructions on his beat.

“They tell me about something over (a CB in the patrol car), and if it’s on my beat, I can go over the shoulders or take side streets to get there,” he said. “Sometimes I just have to stick out traffic if I don’t know where exactly the problem is.”

Ward noted that sometimes the dispatchers receive and mistakenly transmit false alarms, forcing ground units to squander several precious minutes searching for a nonexistent obstruction.

To avoid this, he said, the chopper pilots sometimes fly ahead of ground units and look for possible trouble spots.

Spot Check

Zipping away from a spot where a pickup truck was falsely reported to have overturned, Ward estimated the amount of time that his spot check of the area had just saved a ground unit.

“That was about 15 minutes saved,” Ward said. “(CHP cruisers) would have come all the way out here and found nothing. Now, they can just stay on their beat and find a real problem.”

Traffic-stoppers can assume a myriad of forms, Johnson said, but none is as common as the “looky-loos,” drivers who turn traffic accidents into a spectator sport.

“The stalled cars really can hold up traffic,” he said. “One reason is because they stop in the middle of the freeway, but another, big reason is because people like to stop and look at them.”

Johnson said gawkers tend to cause most of the backups on freeways, so much so that he tries not give them anything to watch.

Even as he ran interference between traffic and a stranded motorcyclist walking his Harley-Davidson to the freeway shoulder, Johnson’s disdain for looky-loos was evident.

“Got any gas?” screamed the stranded biker, Frank Strock, to Johnson. “I need some gas!”

“Just move to the side,” urged Johnson, his voice drowning in the roar of traffic.

Gawker’s Opportunity

“All I need is some gas!” repeated Strock.

“Sir, move as far to the side as you can,” shot back Johnson.

Then, turning to a passenger, the CHP officer said: “I don’t want to give these people anything to look at. They will stare at anything.”

In an effort to cut down on such gawking, the highway patrol has encouraged drivers with cellular car phones to call in locations of obstructions.

The agency has also promoted car-pooling to cut down on congestion, but Los Angeles drivers have been slow to respond to this suggestion.

“They’re just not into car-pooling out here,” Johnson said. “If you could get people to do that, you could cut down on a lot of traffic.”

Nonetheless, said KNX radio traffic reporter Bill Keene, the impact of CLEAR is being felt.

“We used to get reports of stalled cars and people would be out on the roads sometimes for 45 minutes,” Keene said. “Now, it seems, they’re moving much faster.”