The Good Ol’ Summertime Is Gone, So Far as Easier Commuting Goes

Many Orange County residents look to summer as that balmy spell just made for lounging in the sun. Leslie Runzler is no different, but she savors the season for an additional reason. It’s the perfect time to drive to work.

“August is an especially great month,” said Runzler, who commutes from Dana Point to her job in Irvine at Fluor Corp. “Everyone vacations in August, I guess. I can just zoom through the lights and I’m on my way. It’s just wonderful. It’s like traffic you dream about.”

Yes, it’s summertime and the driving is easy. But you won’t have much longer to enjoy it. The summer slack typically disappears after the upcoming Labor Day weekend, transportation experts say.

What better time, then, to gaze back to those happy summer days on the nearly gridlock-free highways and byways of Orange County. All across the Southland, cars packed onto the interstates and arterials during the grueling rush-hour move along noticeably faster during the summer.

Officials with the state Department of Transportation have the numbers to prove it. Orange County commuters could typically drive a congested 11-mile stretch of the Costa Mesa Freeway though the county’s midsection in 28 minutes last spring. The same trip took 20 minutes in the summer.

“You’ve got a couple of things happening,” said Keith Gilbert, highway engineering manager for the Automobile Club of Southern California. “There’s a lot less traffic because school’s out. And with the kids at home, many people take their vacation during the summer, eliminating even more drivers than normal.”

Indeed, freeway veterans contend that they experience improved commute speeds almost every morning and evening of the season.

“Traffic is a lot lighter in the summer,” said Val Denise, a supervisor at an Anaheim Hills travel agency who drives 35 miles down California 91 each morning from her home in the Los Angeles County community of Hawthorne. “I notice it particularly at the interchange where the I-5 and the 91 intersect. When school is in session, every day is a nightmare there. When school’s out, there’s only maybe a couple bad days a week.”

Experts echo those sentiments.

“Summer is a relief. The freeways operate a lot better,” said Joe El-Harake, Orange County commuter lanes coordinator for Caltrans. “Unfortunately, it’s not that way the rest of the year. I compare it to the Three Stooges when all three try to get through the door at the same time and get stuck. It’s the same thing on the freeway most of the year. Everyone jams in at once and the freeway breaks down.”

Officer Ken Daily of the California Highway Patrol’s South County office said he can practically judge the change in seasons by the shifts in traffic. One day the freeway is clogged, with cars backed up on the off-ramps. The next workday, traffic is remarkably thinned out, all because school has shut down for the summer.

“I’ll get out there on my way in to work and see the traffic is light and wonder what’s going on,” Daily said. “Then it’ll dawn on me: ‘Oh yeah, today’s the start of summer vacation.’ It’s a noticeable difference.”

Jim Thornton, an on-air anchor with Metro Traffic Control, which provides periodic commuter reports for more than 30 radio stations throughout the Southland, agreed that freeway congestion eases in the summer.

“Sure, it slackens off when the kids are out of school, and it gets heavier again right after Labor Day,” said Thornton, who ended a yearlong stint in a helicopter in 1987 and now works out of a studio. “But it’s not a huge difference, because there’s always traffic around here. The freeway has its own temperament. Some days it flows; some days it stops dead.”

Denise, meanwhile, theorizes that another factor improves commuting conditions during summer: more hours of daylight. “When the time changes and it gets dark on the freeway, people slow down,” she said. “It just takes more time, especially when it first changes and they start needing their headlights.”

Surprisingly, the smoother commute occurs during a season when Orange County’s freeways handle more cars than any other time of the year, Caltrans officials say.

Herds of tourists jamming the county help boost daily traffic loads higher than during the other nine months. Fortunately, all those out-of-town visitors typically steer clear of the freeways during peak morning and afternoon commuting hours.

With tourists and commuters alike spread relatively evenly through the day, the rush hour becomes more lamb, less lion.

But before you cancel that late summer vacation in favor of a few minutes saved on the trip to work, take heed. Transportation experts are quick to voice several important caveats about summer traffic.

While rush-hour speeds typically rise, traffic during lunchtime and weekends tends to be heavier as tourists and residents hit the pavement, they say. Motorists returning from the beach on a sunny day can make the afternoon commute a grind. Moreover, a smooth rush-hour can be ruined just as easily in summer by a seemingly insignificant event like a stalled car or a minor fender-bender.

Most days, however, traffic moves faster during commuting hours. That improvement occurs chiefly because schools shut down for the season.

In the South County, a large percentage of the high school students with driver’s licenses head each day to campus alone in a car, the CHP’s Daily said. “This is an affluent area we have down here and most of the kids have cars,” he said. “I think it’s probably the same way at the local colleges.”

At Cal State Fullerton, where classes resumed this week, the school-year enrollment of more than 25,000 students shrinks to about 5,400 in the summer, according to Judy Mandel, a university spokeswoman. With only 400 dorm rooms, most everyone drives to campus, squeezing into the nearly 9,000 parking spaces.

Other college campuses have a similar impact on the county’s road network. A quarter of the 16,000 students at UC Irvine live on campus, with the rest driving in to attend classes. When school is in session, the university adds about 43,000 vehicle trips each day to local roads and freeways, said Richard Demerjian, a senior planner with the school.

About 40% of the 26,000 students at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa commute from homes far outside the nine cities that form the school’s district boundaries. With a quarter of the college’s classes meeting before 10 a.m., many of those students are on the road at peak morning traffic hours.

Carole Bartholomew knows firsthand what hordes of college commuters can mean. For nine years she has traversed the streets around Cal State Fullerton on the way from her home in Yorba Linda to work as manager of a bank near the campus.

“I have two paths I travel--one is for summer, one is for when school starts,” said Bartholomew, who commutes entirely on surface streets. “The first week when everyone’s trying to get situated and into classes, it’s unbelievable. The freeway is stopped up at the off-ramps. But then it settles down and you get used to it.”

Some transportation experts say summer isn’t the motoring utopia it once was. With housing construction booming in Orange County, they’ve noticed less of a decline in congestion compared to summers past.

“The line between summer and the rest of the year is becoming blurred,” said Steve Hogan, the county’s transportation program manager. “There’s just so much traffic trying to get from point A to point B; even if you drop parts of it out of the system, it doesn’t solve the congestion problem. You still have congestion.”

Many motorists, however, say it only takes a few weeks of sitting in heavy September congestion to make them yearn for those days of summer on the freeway.

Scott Nelson, a public information officer at UC Irvine, isn’t exactly counting the days left, but admits he’ll probably miss the 10 or 20 minutes he saves on each leg of his 25-mile commute from home in San Clemente to the campus.

“Even in the summer, it’s to the point now that traffic is so bad, you don’t consider it a break, just a brief respite,” Nelson said. “But I imagine that, come September when all the schools start up, I’ll say, ‘God, wasn’t it nice in the summer.’ And it really wasn’t that nice.”