The Converts Go by Bus or Bike, on Skates or Foot

Is there a new “congestion relief ethic” growing among Southern Californians? Is the romance of being alone on the road with a car fading? Here are five examples of new commute relationships that experts hope will flourish in the 1990s.

* BUS: Air quality consultant Mark Abramowitz thinks it is important to practice what he preaches. “I am a firm believer in people reducing their impact on pollution by playing their individual role,” he says.

So he travels by bus, almost exclusively. This includes a commute from his Santa Monica apartment to El Monte, where he is a member of the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s variance hearing board.

“I’m out there virtually every day,” Abramowitz said. He leaves home at 6:30 a.m. for the two-hour, three-bus trip which he doesn’t consider a waste of time. “I can sleep, I can read, and I have a laptop computer and can get work done.”

“Once for a state Senate hearing on the AQMD budget, I drafted my comments on the bus and just opened my computer (a Toshiba 1100) and read the notes from my screen for the committee,” he recalled. “It was my version of telecommunications.”

Abramowitz, who graduated in 1983 from UCLA, developed an appreciation for the environment on backpacking trips in Canada. He has been a clean-air activist and a bus commuter since he moved here, without a car, from Detroit in 1976. “I took the bus everywhere,” he says. “I believed in the importance of ride-sharing and public transit. I got married last September and my wife has a car we sometimes use, but I’ve been able to talk her into doing some car-pooling.”

Getting around on the RTD, especially for someone who attends lots of meetings, rallies and hearings as program director for the Coalition for Clean Air has its ups and downs, he acknowledges.

“I’ve had lots of good experiences. There are some places I’d never take a car to, but would always take a bus to. For instance, in Westwood, it is very difficult to park. And downtown Los Angeles is a great place not to have a car in.”

On the other hand, it can be a major challenge to get to Orange County, even with such bus-rider tricks as picking up a Disneyland shuttle at LAX. “Once I had someone drop me off at the John Wayne Airport to get a shuttle to LAX . . . that day turned into a real nightmare. On the whole, though, it’s really not that much of a sacrifice and it makes me a more pleasant person.”

* BICYCLE: Actor Ed Begley Jr. owns several bicycles, including a collapsible Montague 1000. “I just rode into the hotel from the Amtrak station,” he reported by telephone recently from Washington, where he was attending an NBC affiliates meeting. “I also ride it all around Manhattan. I just fold it up and check it at restaurants and clubs.”

On East and West coasts, Begley frequently travels the celebrity circuit by bicycle. An environmental activist who has been seeking a serious alternative to the combustion engine since the first Earth Day in 1970, he essentially quit driving about two years ago.

A San Fernando Valley resident, he can discuss bike routes into Los Angeles with the expertise of a veteran: “Cahuenga Pass is the easiest, the lowest grade; Laurel is just too tight with those cars coming around blind curves, but there’s an adjacent fire trail; Sepulveda Pass is a wonderful option for going to Santa Monica.”

“In addition to my bicycle, I have an RTD pass and an electric car which I charge with the solar panels on the roof of my garage, and that’s how I get around. My methods may be a bit extreme for many people, but I think we have to begin to do something about the environment in our personal lives.”

Begley acknowledges that he is using his celebrity status to make a statement about the imperiled environment. “There’s not time to go door to door with this,” he insists, in a rapid-fire conversation touching on everything from ozone depletion to waste disposal problems at Los Angeles’ Hyperion Sewage Treatment plant.

“I’m first and foremost an actor, but I love the opportunity to share. I think the answer lies in personal action. We can’t wait all day for legislatures or corporations to act.”

Personal action, he suggests, can start with alternative transportation just one day a week. “You don’t have to drive a 3,700-pound vehicle to pick up a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. It’s ridiculous.”

“We had a romance with our car, but it is coming to an end. We have been jilted, we have been so badly abused by this lover, we have been cheated on, we have been lied to.”

When he gave up his Volvo two years ago, he says, he was aware of the trade-offs. “I knew it would be very rough, extremely difficult and inconvenient and could cost me some work because of the time involved. But I am very stubborn.”

To his surprise, travel by bicycle has been a bonus. “I have more time, I have better time. I’m a guy who will rush around in a Volvo, car phone in hand, trying to do everything. I’ve had to slow down. It’s been medicinal for me: It has improved my character.”

* CAR-POOL: Linda Hinton grew up in the Southern California car culture. “The idea was to work hard so you could buy a nice car,” she said. And, also in the Southern California tradition, she was a drive-alone commuter from her Huntington Beach condominium to her job at Southern California Edison, where she is a corporate services supervisor.

“First I commuted to Covina, and now to South El Monte,” she said. “It’s 30 miles one way.”

She had a Camaro, then a Porsche (“fun to drive but too expensive to maintain”) and in 1986 bought a silver Volvo GLE sedan. About that time she started to look at her commute with a new skepticism. “It seemed like freeway driving was not really fair to a car. You start to see all those miles adding up, all that stop and go, stop and go. You feel like you’re mistreating it.”

She began to think about changing her driving habits. “There were just too many people on the road. I also was becoming aware of pollution. I’ve chosen to live near the ocean since I was 18 years old so I wouldn’t be fighting smog all the time.”

“And what impressed me in the office would be employees coming in who’d been stuck on the freeway. They would be so frazzled, so upset. I realized that traffic is something that’s affecting not only your physical being, but your productivity in the work force.

“You start looking and see what is happening.”

Southern California Edison has a bustling van pool program, but Hinton’s work, supervising meeting planners who travel throughout the company’s service territory, dictates a certain amount of mobility. So she decided to car-pool instead.

Now she shares the ride with one co-worker who is able to take a van home if Hinton needs the car. “I feel good,” she said. “We can drive in the car-pool lane on the 405 and it’s kind of a kick, although you really have to be alert.”

“I feel like I’m saving my car.”

And more than that is involved, she continued. “I’m a native Californian. I love this state and I hate seeing what is happening to it. We are trying different things and it isn’t so hard--you just kind of switch your schedule around. We just have to change, we have to do it.”

* SKATES: Chuck Denman made the decision a year ago.

“I would drive home, then run two miles to the gym and work out for two hours. It was taking all my evenings. First I thought I would jog to work, then I decided to skate. I quit the gym, got a pair of in-line (Roller Blade) skates and started skating from Long Beach to Huntington Beach, nine miles. At first I skated early in the morning so no one would see me.”

Today, Denman, 42, a strategic planner and technology analyst for McDonnell Douglas Space Systems, has become something of an environmental hero in Orange County, swooping along road or sidewalk, following the bicycle lanes (“You can go anywhere a bicycle can go”) on skates, with backpack. He keeps business suits, shirts and ties at the office, and seldom drives his ’87 Mazda.

The transportation change, which he made more than three years ago, was philosophical. Moving out of his car has been a liberation, he says.

“For me, life is full of enough boxes. I come to work in a box, a cubicle in a building. I go home to another box and watch TV in another box. For me expressing my freedom is breaking out of those boxes.

“It keeps me fit and lean and helps my attitude at work. It also rejuvenates me and makes me feel I have a choice. I am not captive to a car.

“Also, I am sensitive to the environment, in my own way. I don’t litter, smoke or drink. It’s my observation that there is a link between your internal system and the system around you.”

Although Denman doesn’t expect many people to emulate him in terms of skating to work, he does hope his public example will encourage people to “jog, park and ride, do something that would free us from the cars and help the environment.

“I see a lot of high school and elementary school kids biking: if we can slowly wean people from driving, taking the long-term view that maybe young people will realize they have a choice.”

“For me--and this is pretty Draconian--I wouldn’t think, if I were a smoker, of being so inconsiderate of going into a restaurant or a private home and smoking, because secondary smoke impinges on peoples’ health and I don’t have the right to do that. I feel the same way about driving. It impinges on peoples’ health. I think it has become an ethical matter.”

* FOOT: When Mike Rohrkastse moved to Glendale from Mission Viejo for a new job last January, he was pleased to find a place to live that was only a mile from work.

‘I’d been commuting 20 miles to Santa Ana and it would sometimes take up to an hour because of the traffic situation in Orange County, so it was in the back of my mind to cut down on driving,” said Rohrkastse, 31, a human resources manager for the Glendale division of Heller Financial, an international lending company.

After a couple of months, he took a close look at his reduced commute and realized that, with the time it took to drive and park, it might be easier to walk. “I decided it was ridiculous to run my car for a mile each way, then turn it off--kind of a waste of time and money.”

Now he walks to his office on North Brand Boulevard. “I felt a little bit funny at first, but now I like it. It takes 10 to 15 minutes.”

Rohrkastse doesn’t consider himself an an ardent environmentalist, but says, “my wife Debbie and I are cognizant of environmental problems. We recycle, we try to watch what we buy in terms of plastic and things like that, and we get reading material from Greenpeace.”

So it’s a bonus that his new commute, which he describes as “short and convenient,” is also helping the pollution problem.

“When you think about it, it’s really kind of stupid to drive one mile.”