Opponents of Car-Pool Lanes Sue Caltrans

An Orange County group opposed to car-pool lanes has sued the state in an effort to lift restrictions on two of the lanes just completed along the San Diego Freeway and open them to all traffic.

A hearing on the lawsuit, filed by Drivers for Highway Safety in Orange County Superior Court, is scheduled for April 19, but California Department of Transportation officials say they do not expect the looming legal battle to delay opening of the new car-pool lanes.

Keith McKean, Orange County district director for Caltrans, said Tuesday that he expects agency officials in Sacramento to give the green light sometime this week to open the new lanes, which stretch along the freeway for 10 miles between the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways.

Drivers for Highway Safety, a grass-roots group that has battled Caltrans over car-pool lanes in Orange County since the mid-1980s, charges in its lawsuit that Caltrans has failed to conduct a study on safety, congestion and freeway capacity that is required by state law before the restricted lanes can be opened.

“This is an open-and-shut case,” said Bill Ward, a leader of the group. “There’s nothing they can say. They just flat didn’t do it.”

Jack Mallinckrodt, another Drivers for Highway Safety leader, said the group decided to file the lawsuit because of frustration in trying to get officials at Caltrans and the Orange County Transportation Commission to show them results of any study.

“We’ve been after them for over a year now to show us where those study results are,” he said. “We’ve been led on one wild goose chase after another. . . . The stonewall has worked great for them. But they can’t stonewall a judge.”

But attorneys for Caltrans say the agency has produced reams of data on the viability of the new car-pool lanes along the San Diego Freeway.

“What they’re attempting is a throwback to the ‘50s and ‘60s when everyone was in their own car and had as much concrete as they could use,” said David Simmes, a Caltrans attorney. “But times have changed. We don’t live in that society. We have large demands on a small number of freeways. The old days are gone.”

Simmes said California law requires only that the agency provide an engineering estimate of how well the lanes will work, not the sort of complex study that Drivers for Highway Safety would like to see.

“They’d like to see a study that is sufficient to send a rocket to the moon,” Simmes said. “This is nothing more than a nuisance lawsuit.”

But if Drivers for Highway Safety were to win the court battle, it could mean the car-pool lanes would simply be shut down, not opened for all traffic, Simmes said. The new lanes were financed largely with federal funds that were provided with the caveat that only car pools would be allowed to use the lanes.

Drivers for Highway Safety, which is led by a cadre of a half-dozen men with engineering backgrounds, believes the car-pool lanes are less safe because during peak hours they can create a situation in which cars are hurtling along at high speeds next to a row of vehicles stalled in heavy traffic. In addition, the group believes the lanes actually cause more congestion by cramming a majority of cars into fewer lanes.

Caltrans officials argue that the lanes have been a success, acting as an incentive for some motorists to car-pool.