Car-Pool Lanes Drive These Fellows Crazy : Transportation: A small, zealous band devoted to the abolition of commuter lanes has kept government agencies off balance with their arguments.

Some people spend their leisure time collecting stamps. Others umpire Little League baseball games, do charity work or keep tropical fish.

But Joe Catron, Bill Ward and their buddies hardly have time for such conventional pastimes. Their avocation is fighting for the abolition of car-pool lanes.

It might seem an esoteric quest, but Catron and his bunch have caused quite a stir in Orange County during the past four years.

Banded together in a loosely organized grass-roots group dubbed Drivers for Highway Safety, they have time and again taken on the agencies governing the county’s roads and freeways.

And time and again they have sparked embarrassment and irritation among technocrats and politicians, pressing forward with an unswerving zeal to debunk what they see as the myth that car-pool lanes can cure Orange County’s crushing traffic woes.

They insist that the commuter lanes are little more than a vain attempt at “social engineering” that has actually increased freeway congestion and caused other problems, among them frayed nerves, a higher accident rate and a heavier dose of air pollution from cars chugging through the traffic congestion.

“This claim that car-pool lanes are a success is just a fantasy,” said Ward, a Costa Mesa resident. “Caltrans has slanted the data. There’s no guise of objectivity. It’s just a marketing ploy. . . . The real experts are the people fighting through traffic every day. They know the truth.”

Such arguments prove irksome to officials at the state Transportation Department’s Orange County office and the other government bodies that frequently cross rhetorical swords with Drivers for Highway Safety. As they see it, the group is little better than a flat-Earth society, massaging the facts to fit their philosophical argument.

“If they were just a bunch of loonies I’d ignore them, but they seem like intelligent people,” said Dana Reed, an Orange County Transportation Commission member. “Still, it’s very difficult to take them too seriously when they’re in complete opposition to everyone else in the field. . . . They seem to have a single-minded purpose--they just don’t want diamond lanes.”

Concerns Over Safety

The group was born in 1985 after Orange County’s first car-pool lane went into operation along the Costa Mesa Freeway. Catron, an erstwhile race-car driver who owns an Irvine auto leasing firm, watched cars in the commuter lane roar by, just inches from traffic in the other lanes, and became concerned about potential safety problems.

Since those early days of focusing on the accident issue, Drivers for Highway Safety has blossomed into a group that simply sees no need for the lanes in Orange County.

“In this county, we have no one downtown area, people are going in every different direction,” Catron said. “Car-pool lanes are a concept that’s just not right for Orange County.”

Steered by an avuncular group of about a half-dozen true believers drawn mostly from the engineering field, Drivers for Highway Safety has produced reams of weighty position papers that take government statistics and turn them inside out in an effort to prove their point.

But the assault hasn’t stopped there. They’ve held numerous press conferences and have pelted various agencies with Freedom of Information Act requests, relentlessly pursuing the sort of smoking-gun evidence they suspect is lurking in the file cabinets at Caltrans.

In years past, they’ve attempted to foment mass revolt, calling for commuters to drive with headlights on and red ribbons around their antennas as a gesture of solidarity against the lanes. That campaign, however, never really caught on.

Of late, the group has turned to the county grand jury in hopes of sparking an investigation of car-pool lanes as a counterproductive approach to traffic management. They would also like to see the County Transportation Commission, an appointed body, replaced by elected members.

“We go out and talk to them about our concerns, but we might as well talk to a freeway overpass,” Ward groused. “They’re not even listening. It’s a slam-dunk. They just rubber stamp their staff’s recommendations.”

Such single-minded devotion to the cause has spawned an occasional victory.

Two years ago, the group grew concerned that lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway were too narrow because of the car-pool lane that had been shoehorned into the right-of-way. Unwilling to accept reassurances from state transportation officials that the lanes were regulation width, a couple of Drivers for Highway Safety members devised a scheme to test it for themselves.

Lane-Width Victory

First, they slathered white paint on a wooden 4-by-4-inch post and laced it with black stripes at 1-foot intervals. Then they lashed the jumbo measuring stick across the back bumper of Jack Mallinckrodt’s car, took off down the freeway and snapped photographs from a vehicle trailing behind.

Extrapolating from the photographs, Mallinckrodt came to the conclusion that several lanes were well under the 10-foot minimum required by law. After a couple of months, Caltrans sent out a crew one night to measure the lanes. Lo and behold, they discovered that some stretches were less than nine feet wide. The offending lanes were promptly restriped.

But these are even headier days for Drivers for Highway Safety. The group’s hierarchy is accepting at least partial credit for the defeat of Measure M, the multibillion-dollar transportation financing package for Orange County that failed at the polls in early November.

“Yes, it does feel good in the gut,” Mallinckrodt said, beaming. “Much as we’d like to see more freeway lanes built, this measure was tied to a plan that would have wasted two-thirds of the money” on car-pool lanes and mass transit.

Like many of his peers, Mallinckrodt admits to spending 10 to 15 hours a week on Drivers for Highway Safety business. And, like the others, Mallinckrodt has the technical smarts to make a pretty impressive case.

He has spent a career consulting for aerospace companies, giving advice on how to build sophisticated antenna networks. Les Berriman, another member, is a retired chemical engineer. Wayne King is an engineering technician specializing in software development. Ward consults in electronics and new product development for a variety of firms.

But why spend all the time? King, for one, says his fervor stems from the danger and congestion he saw caused by the introduction of car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway.

“It’s crazy, absolutely insane,” said King. “It has done in my habits. I’m fighting it for me, if nobody else. Sure, I’ve got other things I want to do, but I’m so mad now, I’m in this for the duration.”

Says Berriman: “The diamond lanes are something that’s so obviously wrong. That’s what gets me upset about it.” And Mallinckrodt adds: “It’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve very been involved with. This whole diamond-lane movement is one of the wildest delusions of government I’ve seen anywhere.”

The group has a mailing list of about 300 people, and can “rustle up 25 to 50 people without any trouble” to storm a meeting, according to Ward. But most of the work is done by eight to 10 unelected leaders who meet every couple weeks to talk shop. No votes are taken, no dues collected.

“We’re highly unorganized,” said Mallinckrodt. “We just go out and do our own thing, come back together and somehow it all works out.”

Different but United

They come from a variety of political philosophies. Berriman is a self-avowed “rock-rib Reaganite Republican,” while King will gladly pull out a card certifying his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union.

The thing that draws the group together, gets their blood boiling and their noggins working, is the unrelenting presence of diamond lanes.

Nonetheless, even the most resolute members of Drivers for Highway Safety admit that they occasionally feel their iconoclastic cause is like a car headed the wrong way up a freeway. Despite their arguments, despite the blizzard of statistics, a sizable share of the public remains predisposed to car-pool lanes, they lament.

“Remember the old movie ‘The Blob?’ ” Ward asked. “Some people see this man-eating blob in the woods so they rush back to town to warn everyone. Sure enough, no one believes them, and the blob comes and eats up the town.

“That’s the way we feel sometimes. We’re running around trying to tell people, ‘Hey, wake up, look what’s happening.’ ”

But several political forces in Orange County have heeded the group’s warning about car-pool lanes, most notably state Assemblyman Nolan Frizzelle (R-Huntington Beach).

“I think they’re performing quite a great service in that they do an honest analysis of the data, rather than the self-serving analysis that Caltrans performs,” Frizzelle said. “I trust them more than I trust Caltrans. And I think the public ought to also. The public has been hoodwinked.”

State Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), while not sharing staunch anti-commuter lane fervor, credits the group with helping “raise a red flag on the safety issue” and prodding him to push through legislation in late 1987 that led to wider buffer zones between the car-pool and general use lanes.

Some opponents concede that Drivers for Highway Safety have highlighted safety problems, but can find little else about the group to like.

In particular, they suggest that Catron, Ward and the others take a simplistic approach in their analysis of the lanes’ effectiveness, ignoring the effects on surrounding city streets and other factors.

“I don’t think they let facts stand in the way of a good story,” said Stanley T. Oftelie, the County Transportation Commission’s executive director. “All the other researchers look at the impact of car-pool lanes and say they’re a success. Drivers for Highway Safety look at them and say they aren’t. It almost becomes an argument whether the glass is half full or half empty.”

Tustin Mayor Richard B. Edgar, a county transportation commissioner, said the group operates on the premise of “the big lie”--that Caltrans and other agencies are trying to pull a fast one by foisting car-pool lanes on an unsuspecting public.

Officials at Caltrans take exception to the group’s argument that the lanes prove largely ineffective in motivating people to car-pool and merely redistribute traffic, pushing the bulk of it into the remaining lanes.

“When we first opened the lanes on the 55 (Costa Mesa Freeway), we had 5,000 vehicles in the car-pool lane, now we have more than 23,000 a day,” said Joe El-Harake, commuter lanes coordinator at Caltrans’ Orange County branch.

Wherever the truth lies, Drivers for Highway Safety has certainly caused a commotion. Eager to spread the word, Catron is talking about starting new chapters elsewhere in the state.

They’ve already shared information and moral support with a similar group in the Northern California city of Santa Clara. They also helped residents in northern Los Angeles County defeat plans for a car-pool lane along the Ventura Freeway in 1987.

“We can make a difference,” said Mallinckrodt. “I think we can do it. And that’s exciting as hell.”