OCTD Comes Clean on Buses’ Puzzling Plates

Dear Street Smart:

Why is it that the letters are sprayed out on the license plates of most of the Orange County Transit District buses on the road? This is not every one of them, but a good percentage. My question is: How come?

Larry Tracy

Costa Mesa

Yes indeed, this seems one of those little mysteries of the roadway. Except it isn’t all that mysterious.

Actually, the license plate letters aren’t sprayed out. They’ve been worn away. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves with this little tale, so let’s start from the beginning.

As the transit district’s buses travel the streets and highways, they get pretty dirty. Eager to keep the fleet sleek and shining, the district washes its buses each and every day they are used.

To do so, the buses are rolled each night into a big contraption that washes them down, much like the big roller brushes, spray jets and whooshing air at a commercial car wash. All the soap and sudsy water, while keeping the exterior of each bus clean, eventually washes away the paint on the license plate, according to Mona Ziada, a spokeswoman for the district.

Ziada said transit authorities have received only a couple of complaints in the past few years about the plates. Nonetheless, she said that maintenance crews try to keep on top of the problem by reordering plates from the state when the paint becomes so worn off that their numbers and letters are hard to read.

Although the worn plates make it tougher to identify a bus, there’s a sure-fire way to fingerprint one of the big boxy vehicles if you ever need to. A four-digit identification number is stenciled in black on the rear upper-left corner of each bus, Ziada said.

Dear Street Smart:

I wonder if you could elicit from Caltrans the reason why the car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway are closed to general traffic during off-peak hours.

Commuter lanes on the Interstate 101 in the Bay Area are open in off-peak hours, as are similar lanes in Florida. I’m aware of this from personal experience, and understand that other states operate their commuter lanes in like fashion.

During off-peak hours, the car-pool lanes are virtually empty, while the adjoining general use lanes are clogged, often with stop-and-go traffic. Opening the extra lanes would facilitate traffic flow, and I really suspect most Orange County drivers can adequately handle the complexity as well as our northern and eastern brethren.

D.I. Coulson

Orange

I’ve been waiting for someone to ask this one. As a native of Northern California, I’ve always enjoyed zipping into the car-pool lanes up there during off-peak hours and was surprised to find the regulations were different in the Southland.

There’s a reason. Joe El-Harake, commuter lanes coordinator for Caltrans in Orange County, said studies have shown that opening up the restricted strips of asphalt during off-peak hours only increases problems during rush hour with people violating the car-pool rules, which require two people per vehicle.

“The trade-off is a high violation rate,” El-Harake said. “It also makes for more complicated signing along the road.”