Seeking a Road Less Traveled : Commute: Ride Share Week begins with levity, but the message about car-pooling is serious business.

Four women named Cheryl pulled up for work at Toshiba America Monday morning in the “Cheryl-mobile”; at Western Financial Savings Bank, a vice president rode his horse to work and a dozen employees dressed in gorilla suits arrived in a van, and back at Toshiba, a guy commuted the mile from home in his 6-year-old’s battery-powered toy Jeep.

It was the first day of Ride Share Week in California, and across Orange County lots of people were doing their bit to promote car-pooling, buses, trains, walking, bicycling and van-pooling.

But after six years of Ride Share Weeks, lots of publicity and a new regulation that requires employers to provide incentives for car-pooling, Orange County still lags behind Southern California’s four other counties in breaking one of our favorite habits: driving to work alone.

Only an estimated 14% of the county’s commuters broke the habit last year, according to a well-regarded survey of 500 Orange County commuters by Commuter Transportation Services, a nonprofit, ride-sharing group.

For all of Southern California, the percentage was 21%.

Commuter Transportation Services didn’t measure Orange County until last year, so it’s not known whether that 14% is an improvement over previous years. But an earlier study by an engineer at UC Irvine suggests that the county hasn’t exactly been overwhelmed by a surge in the number of car-poolers.

That UCI study found that the average number of riders per car during commuting hours was 1.2 in 1988--a number that hadn’t changed in 15 years, since the energy crisis of 1973. The study has not been updated.

Nobody knows exactly why Orange County is so slow to share rides; perhaps because its residents are more affluent and can more easily afford to drive alone, the South Coast Air Quality Management District says; or maybe it’s because there is limited mass transit here, Commuter Transportation Services says; or perhaps because it’s so spread out with no central business district like downtown Los Angeles, the Orange County Transportation Authority says.

But at least part of the answer may be found in another statistic: Orange County commuters had the shortest commute on average last year in Southern California--about 15 miles. Riverside commuters had the longest--a little more than 21 miles. And UCI found something in its study that common sense might also suggest: The shorter the commute, the less likely a person is to car-pool.

Still, alternatives to commuting alone in a car are gaining a bigger foothold in Southern California, if perhaps more slowly in Orange County. Two years ago, only 17% of commuters used alternatives to driving solo, compared to the 21% found last year by Commuter Transportation Services.

And that runs counter to the national trend, where alternatives to commuting alone in a car are actually on the decline, says Jan Baird, a vice president at Commuter Transportation. It’s not clear why, she says. One reason may be that over the past 10 years, cities around the country have grown rapidly by spreading ever farther into the suburbs, where mass transit can’t or won’t follow.

But then, the rest of the country doesn’t have the severe smog problem that the Los Angeles Basin has. Nor does it have the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which has ordered Southern California’s employers of more than 100 to come up with plans to get more of their employees into car pools or face big fines.

A few companies have already landed in hot water with the AQMD. The biggest fine so far--$70,000--was levied on a Hitachi Corp. unit in Anaheim that failed to get its ride-share plan in on time last year.

So Ride Share Week continues. Beckman Instruments Inc. in Fullerton intends to donate $2 apiece to the Beckman Foundation for the Environment for every employee who walks, bikes or car-pools to work today . On Wednesday, Newport Beach’s Newport Center Transportation Management Assn. plans to use food, games and prizes to lure workers to the Fashion Island Mall, where ride-share groups will have booths set up.

But all this may amount to no more than preaching to the converted. Take Joe Wheeler, for instance, the manager of data-processing services at Toshiba who drove his daughter’s toy Jeep to work. He got a lot of stares Monday morning on Bake Parkway as he tootled along on the sidewalk at a couple of miles an hour.

But Wheeler already avoids his car on the short commute between his home in El Toro and the plant in Irvine.

“I walk to work every day,” he says.

Getting to Work a New Way A survey asked commuters if they would consider an alternative mode of transportation one or two days a week, just to see if they like it. Car pool: 44% Van pool: 38% Rail: 29% Bus: 24% Bicycle: 20% Walking: 17% Source: Commuter Transporation Services