STREET SMART : CHP Makes Fast Buck Corralling Car-Pool Lane Cheats

It’s as irksome as the sound of a dentist’s drill. You are stuck in Orange County’s morning commute when some hotshot veers into the car-pool lane and screeches off.

OK, fine. Except this guy is all alone, one man in a car, clearly violating the first commandment of the car-pool lane: Thou shalt not have fewer than two people to a vehicle.

Stifling the urge to whip in the car-pool lane yourself and get to work 10 minutes early, you utter a scream humans can produce only upon witnessing such motoring blasphemy. Where is the Highway Patrol when you need ‘em?

Don’t fret. Of late, the CHP has been working extra hard to nab those motorists who dare to skirt the law and go solo in the car-pool lane.

Consider, for instance, the haul officers reeled in Oct. 5, the official “Keep California Moving Day” dedicated to promoting car-pooling in the state. The CHP ticketed 66 motorists in Orange County that day for riding alone in car-pool lanes.

But this wasn’t a one-shot crackdown. The CHP has allocated more than 6,000 hours of overtime this year for its officers to focus entirely on catching car-pool cheats in Orange County. The results have been more than 8,200 tickets given in the county during the first nine months of the year, compared to 9,700 tickets in all of 1988.

Each motorist snagged got a surprise--a jumbo fine ranging from $246 for a first-time offender to $613 for those daring scofflaws corralled by the CHP a third time in the car-pool lane.

“Yeah, for an infraction, that’s pretty stiff,” said Officer Lyle Whitten, spokesman for the CHP’s Westminster division. “But it’s made that way on purpose, to get people’s attention. If everyone violates the law, the car-pool lane becomes useless.”

Faced with the prospect of forking over a sizable chunk of their bank account for a few minutes of freeway disobedience, Orange County motorists will say or do the darndest things. Just ask Whitten.

“We’ve had people with blow-up dolls in their cars as the passenger,” Whitten related. “We’ve also had people put hats on top of the passenger seat’s headrest to try to make us believe it’s a person.”

Then there is the case of Diane Correll, a pregnant woman who in 1987 went to court and argued that her unborn child represented a passenger as she zipped down the car-pool lane on the Costa Mesa Freeway. Sorry ma’am. That one didn’t fly with the judge.

But the officer’s all-time favorite is the tale about the mortician. Yup, you guessed it. This particular undertaker figured the dead body in the back of his hearse gave him carte blanche to roar down the wide-open car-pool lane. Or so he said.

“The court ruled against him,” Whitten recalled with a chuckle. “The judge said the body qualified as cargo, not as a passenger, because the person was dead.”

Joe El-Harake, Orange County commuter lanes coordinator for the California Department of Transportation, said he’s most confounded by the cheats who jump into the car-pool lane even though traffic in the other lanes is flowing free.

“You have to wonder why this kind of guy is taking chances,” El-Harake said. “I think they figure there’s more predictability in the (car-pool) lane, so they hop on it. Maybe some of them just like to take the risk, to live dangerously.”

And maybe some simply don’t realize the stakes if they’re caught. With that in mind, Caltrans is now considering whether to post signs warning motorists of the fines for going it alone in the car-pool lanes.

Even without such warnings, Orange County’s car-pool lanes have enjoyed a respectable record of lawful use compared to others throughout the state, El-Harake said. Cheats make up 9% of the users on the Costa Mesa Freeway’s car-pool lanes, while the restricted strips of asphalt on the San Diego Freeway between Seal Beach and Costa Mesa have a violation rate of less than 5%, he said.

El-Harake hopes that the number of violators will fall even further as word gets out about the hefty fines.

“The tickets are so expensive, if you get nailed you’re in trouble,” El-Harake said. “People just aren’t aware of the risk they’re taking. They look at the ticket and think it’s a misprint.”

Next Week: Readers write about the Orange County freeway they loathe most.