COUNTYWIDE : OCTC to Redo Study on Car-Pool Lanes

A six-month, $10,000 consultant’s study comparing Orange County’s car-pool lanes to those in other areas was discarded Monday after Supervisor Roger R. Stanton described it as “worthless.”

The study showed that restricting the special lanes to car pools 24 hours per day is consistent with practices in other Southern California counties. But the report also showed that a majority of car-pool lanes in the United States are used for car pools only during rush hours and are open to general traffic at other times.

Last September, Stanton requested the study, saying that if peak-period use by car pools was more efficient and fairer to motorists, then Orange County’s car-pool lanes should convert to such a system.

But Stanton and Drivers for Highway Safety, a grass-roots group opposed to car-pool lanes, strongly criticized the study because it contained no such analysis. Instead, it merely suggested that 24-hour operations might be worth keeping in Southern California because home-to-work commutes are widely dispersed geographically and workers here tend to use their cars during the day and after work to run errands.

The consultant, New York-based Al Gonseth, sat quietly in the audience but left hastily without offering a response.

Orange County Transportation Commission officials presented an oral report that urged turning operational issues, such as car-pool-lane hours, over to a regional group, but board members could not agree on which one.

OCTC officials said they would pay Gonseth’s fee even though they had been forced to return drafts of the study to Gonseth five times for revisions. OCTC Executive Director Stanley T. Oftelie said his staff will now do the analysis Stanton originally sought.

Lester P. Berriman, a spokesman for Drivers for Highway Safety, argued that not only did Gonseth’s study fail to settle any issues but that OCTC and the state as whole should discontinue car-pool lanes wherever they fail to show a significant increase in the rate at which car-pools are being formed.

The group has argued for several years that none of the existing car-pool lanes meets that test.

Also, Berriman questioned the rush to build more car-pool lanes. He cited research by UC Irvine economics professor Charles A. Lave showing that traffic congestion may not get much worse, despite doomsday predictions by some officials, because the number of vehicles per household and the number of miles being driven nationally are leveling off after decades of huge increases.

In other action, the OCTC board seated a new member--La Habra City Councilman William D. Mahoney. He replaced former Brea Councilwoman Clarice A. Blamer, who was defeated for reelection in last November’s city council races.