Keeping Tabs on the County’s Traffic : Highways: The CHP and Caltrans have opened the doors of a command post that will help them assess and respond to congestion faster.

Imagine this: A truck loaded with oranges has flipped on the Santa Ana Freeway just before rush hour. No one is hurt, but tons of fruit are covering the highway, threatening to turn the morning commute into the kind of experience that makes Iowa seem inviting.

Time was when the California Highway Patrol had to get on the telephone and call across town to Caltrans for help. It all worked OK, but occasionally the lines of communication left a lot to be desired, and the response time could lag.

Perhaps not anymore. Now the CHP and California Department of Transportation will be working shoulder to shoulder to make sure Orange County gets to work on time.

The two agencies swung open the doors Wednesday on a new joint command post designed to speed response to traffic jams caused by everything from fender-benders to jackknifed trucks.

Packed with enough electronic gadgetry to keep the average 8-year-old video game junkie occupied for hours, the Traffic Operations Center features high-tech terminals displaying continuously updated reports on the status of freeways from Stanton to San Clemente.

Armed with the latest freeway information, CHP and Caltrans officials can work together to deploy their forces far more effectively than in the past.

“The whole crux of the center is a quicker detection capacity and, therefore, a quicker response,” said Joe Hecker, Caltrans traffic management chief in Orange County. “Logistically, we’ll just be better off. All the CHP will have to do is turn and look across the room to Caltrans for help.”

Operating during the workweek from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., the center is staffed by three Caltrans transportation engineers and three CHP officers, among them a public information officer who supplies updated reports to radio news programs on the status of traffic.

A similar center has been keeping tabs on traffic in Los Angeles since the early 1970s, Hecker said, and another one was established in San Diego a few months ago. A traffic operations center for the Inland Empire is scheduled to be opened early next year.

For the next few weeks, the crew assigned to the Orange County center will be working the bugs out of the equipment and learning their roles.

Situated in a remote room in the cavernous Caltrans district headquarters at the edge of Santa Ana, the center is scheduled to be formally christened on Jan. 9, and to a certain extent it shows. Wires still hang from the ceiling in spots. The modular desks have yet to arrive, and much of the equipment will not be in place until later in 1991. For now, the employees are putting up with rented furniture.

But at the same time, the place already has a certain gee-whiz quality.

One video terminal displays a map of Orange County’s freeway network, with pinpoint-size colored dots lining each highway. The dots flash various colors to indicate how fast traffic is moving past a given spot, and the screen can be manipulated to zoom in on a certain segment for a closer look.

Green means the cars are flowing at 35 m.p.h. or better. Amber means traffic has slowed to between 20-35 m.p.h. Red means there are problems: Traffic is moving less than 20 m.p.h.

Updated information comes in every 30 seconds, fed to the screen by wire loops in the pavement along on-ramps scattered across Orange County. Of the 280 miles of freeway in the county, the computer is able to monitor 160 miles, according to Hecker. And by keeping an eye on those dots, workers in the center can tell when problems may be cropping up along a certain stretch of highway.

“If there’s a major incident, we can look at it here and make some judgments together on how best to tackle it,” Hecker said.

Workers at the center also can control the messages flashed on electronic sign boards that are popping up along stretches of freeway. Four of the permanent sign boards are already in place, and three others will soon be completed, Hecker said.

Within six months, a closed-circuit TV system will be installed featuring cameras mounted at the interchange of the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, the site of an ongoing highway widening effort that is causing considerable congestion these days. Hecker said authorities hope to eventually expand the network of video cameras, which will allow workers in the traffic center to get a bird’s-eye view of exactly what is happening on the freeway.

Hecker said only experience will tell how much time the center helps save in the battle against gridlock. Even if it means getting a work crew out to clean up an accident scene just a few minutes earlier, it will be worth the effort.

Studies have shown that for each minute the freeway is clogged by an accident, it backs up traffic for an additional four minutes. So if our imaginary overturned orange truck backs up traffic for an hour, one can expect four hours of congestion as a result.

“I’m really excited about the center and what it can do,” Hecker said. “Traffic congestion in Orange County is quite a problem, so this can be a great tool.”