1 Car-Pool Lane Opens Today; Suit to Block It Fails : Litigation: A judge rules that a challenged Caltrans report satisfied state law. The new southbound strip on the San Diego Freeway should open early next week.

An Orange County Superior Court judge Thursday rejected a challenge to the opening of car-pool lanes along a 10-mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway, clearing the way for today’s long-awaited unveiling.

Armed with the ruling by Judge William F. Rylaarsdam, officials at the California Department of Transportation announced that the northbound car-pool lane would open at 7 a.m. today and the southbound strip should go into operation by early next week.

The two new lanes, which extend from where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways meet to the Corona del Mar Freeway, connect to an existing 14-mile stretch of car-pool lanes on the San Diego Freeway to form the longest, continuous “high-occupancy vehicle” network in the state, Caltrans officials said.

“We’re happy,” Caltrans spokesman Albert Miranda said. “We think this ruling substantiates everything we’ve been saying.”

Until the hearing Thursday, however, the fate of the lanes was very much in doubt. Caltrans delayed the planned opening earlier this month after Drivers for Highway Safety, an Orange County-based organization that has clashed consistently with the agency over car-pool lanes, filed its lawsuit.

The delay prompted transportation coordinators from several large Orange County corporations representing more than 13,000 employees to picket the freeway earlier this month and dispatch a petition to Caltrans in an unsuccessful push to get the lanes opened before the court hearing.

Drivers for Highway Safety maintained that the agency had failed to complete the required studies needed before the lanes could go into operation. The group’s primary goal was to block the opening of the car-pool lanes in hopes of forcing Caltrans to allow mixed-use traffic for the lanes.

Members of the organization contend that car-pool lanes, which are restricted to vehicles with two or more occupants, are unsafe because during peak hours, cars using them hurtle along at high speeds in close proximity to rows of vehicles moving slowly or stalled in heavy traffic. In addition, the group believes that the lanes actually cause more congestion by cramming a majority of cars into fewer lanes.

Rylaarsdam steered clear of considering such arguments during Thursday’s hearing, focusing instead on the matter of several engineering studies that Caltrans is required by law to complete before construction or operation of a car-pool lane.

“Whether or not diamond lanes are safe or unsafe is irrelevant to this hearing,” Rylaarsdam said, adding that the issue at stake was “whether or not the state complied with the law.”

Mark Rosen, the attorney representing Drivers for Highway Safety, argued that Caltrans had failed to produce the required studies, suggesting that a report the agency issued April 10 was “the barest bones of something thrown together as a result of this lawsuit with no real data behind it.”

David Simmes, a Caltrans attorney, countered that the agency had fulfilled its obligation to produce the required studies, arguing that the car-pool lanes had been studied and debated by Orange County transportation officials and representatives of cities along the freeway as far back as 1985.

Rosen said, however, that those initial discussions took place in an atmosphere devoid of the sorts of statistical analysis and studies needed for authorities to make a valid decision on the safety and effectiveness of the lanes. In addition, he argued that members of Drivers for Highway Safety had consistently been denied access to any information from Caltrans on the lanes.

Rylaarsdam agreed that Caltrans probably had not followed the letter of the law by failing to perform an engineering study before construction began. In addition, Rylaarsdam expressed concern that the agency appeared to have produced the April 10 report only after Drivers for Highway Safety filed suit about a week earlier.

But in the end, the judge sided with Caltrans.

He said the report, although late in coming, seemed to satisfy a state law requiring an engineering study on safety, congestion and freeway capacity. In addition, Rylaarsdam noted that there was no way he could order Caltrans to fulfill the requirement to complete a study before construction had commenced, saying that he “could hardly make an order demanding an impossibility.”

Leaders of Drivers for Highway Safety said they were saddened by the Rylaarsdam’s ruling but felt that they had won “a moral victory” because the judge seemed sympathetic to their arguments.

“Hopefully, this will force Caltrans to be a little more honest in the future,” said Les Berriman, one of the group’s directors. “If they do an adequate safety study, it will show that the number of accidents goes up dramatically when a car-pool lane is built.”

Caltrans officials have consistently defended car-pool lanes, saying they do not pose a significantly greater accident risk.