Dire Problem / Drastic Cures : School: A Stop on the Road to Gridlock

In diagnosing congestion, experts are finding out, everything matters--even the number of teen-agers driving to high school.

Steering your own four wheels to class--long a part of the Southern California lifestyle--has become a nationwide practice, say transportation experts.

With congestion slowly engulfing the nation, transportation planners have begun focusing on high school driving and other once-overlooked factors, including trips to the video store, friends sharing a car to get to a concert and short runs to the doctor.

“It’s not all long commutes,” said Frederick W. Ducca, a planner with the Federal Highway Administration.

“There are dozens of little reasons why Americans are driving more, reasons that we’ve all but ignored.”

Nationally, motorists drove nearly 40% more total miles in 1990 than a decade earlier, experts say; in Southern California, the decade-long increase exceeded 50%.

At a recent conference at UC Irvine, planners and transportation experts compiled a list of little-noticed factors that contribute to today’s traffic malaise.

Among them: more families with both spouses working; more households created--each with a wage-earner--as divorce flourishes; more cars per household as prosperity spreads; more short drives to the store; more houses in distant suburbs forcing longer drives to work.

Alan E. Pisarski, author of several books on commuting, said he thinks most of these factors stem from a single demographic development: In the 1980s, the Baby Boom generation came into the work force and into its prime driving years.

Many of these thirtysomething motorists “are prosperous young parents now, and they drive because they have to in order to get around in suburbia,” Pisarski said, “but also because it’s almost second nature to them to get behind the wheel” rather than walk or take a bus.

Higher numbers of teen-agers driving to high school, Pisarski said, “reflects increased prosperity and the car as status symbol among the young.”

“Our parking lot is always full,” said Joan K. Elam, principal of James Monroe High School in Sepulveda.

The 200-space parking lot at William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills starts filling up at 7 a.m., an hour before the first class, said Leon Mason, assistant principal.

Those who don’t get a spot flood surrounding streets with their cars.

Since school officials don’t control off-street parking, said Mason, “We don’t know if there are more driving or not. But there are a lot of students with cars, I can tell you that.”