Traffic Studies Are More Than Academic at UCI : Transportation: Statewide institute’s sometimes-intriguing findings can shape road design and public policy.

Ask an eclectic group of academicians to ponder California’s traffic mess, and what you get are some surprising, provocative, controversial or esoteric results.

For instance, there was the study showing that commuters’ blood pressure rises and job performance drops after long commutes because of stress. Another proposed fees for drivers who use the freeway during peak periods. And a third suggested that traffic cannot get much worse because vehicle ownership has maxed out among the over-16 crowd.

Those are examples of the work at the University of California’s Institute for Transportation Studies (ITS) branch at UC Irvine, a loose confederation of 15 faculty members and 30 graduate students from widely disparate academic disciplines.

With other branches at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, the statewide institute was chartered by the Legislature in 1947 to provide state-of-the-art help during a mammoth highway building campaign. But the charter was changed in the environmentally awakened 1970s to a holistic approach, taking in transit, economics, psychology and other disciplines because, the charter said, “transportation impacts all aspects of life.”

The institute’s results can shape both road design and public policy. As a result of a study of truck accidents, for example, the California Department of Transportation is changing the design of freeway-to-freeway connectors. Another study that focused on ramp meters is expected to change the meters’ timing to reflect traffic conditions more accurately.

In a current study by institute researchers at UC Irvine, some Irvine Business Complex workers are being tracked to see how they respond to employer-sponsored incentives to car-pool.

“We’re tracing their travel patterns,” said Prof. Wilfred W. Recker, the institute’s director at UCI. “It’s not even clear at this point that if you get people to car-pool, that you really decrease the number of trips or--because they’re structured into riding with somebody else to work and back--they have to do all their little errands some other time and thus make as many trips as before.”

If the findings are that car-pooling is not reducing emissions during peak periods, said Claudia Keith, spokeswoman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, then the agency would check the figures.

“If they looked good,” she said, “we might change the rules.”

More likely, Keith said, employers would be urged to try a different mix of strategies, such as transit and telecommuting, to reduce solo commutes as required by AQMD Regulation 15.

City and county governments do not use the institute much for specific problem-solving. But two weeks ago, Caltrans awarded $3 million to the institute to study ways to manage traffic flow with Space Age technology. They will study ways to use infrared sensors and ground images from satellites and to equip cars with electronic guidance systems that would permit vehicles to drive themselves in tighter bunches, which would translate to more vehicles on the road.

The three-year Caltrans project is the institute’s most ambitious yet, said Recker, a fast-talking professor of civil engineering.

“Nobody in the world would seriously question (U.S.) capability in terms of the technology that we’ve developed in communications and control through our aerospace and defense industries, and now that technology is suddenly looking for a domestic application,” he said. “We’ve gotten to where it’s old enough and has been around enough to where it’s no longer as proprietary or as classified as it once was.”

The institute has gained attention for holding national conferences on car-pool lanes, telecommuting and varied other topics. And the research ranges widely, from design and safety issues to decision-making.

Some examples:

* A study of Interstate 10 to determine whether collisions are a key contributor to slowdowns showed that crash disruptions are mostly of short duration and rarely close lanes. Indeed, most traffic interruptions “are not due to accidents but are caused by events such as stalls and spilled loads,” the institute found.

* Truck accidents on freeway-to-freeway connectors average one a week, causing “extreme congestion.” Researchers found that ramps were often built with cars in mind and that trucks are not built to maneuver as well as cars. Design changes are being recommended to Caltrans.

* With computer help, Prof. Stephen G. Ritchie is developing so-called artificial intelligence applications, or “expert systems,” to respond to slowdowns as part of Caltrans’ “smart corridor” project on the Harbor Freeway. Once fully developed, computers--analyzing information from the field--could give officials a menu of recommended responses with predicted results. For example, a spilled load on a freeway connector could lead to advice from the computer system to divert traffic along one of several surface streets, with each one ranked according to how free-flowing it is at the moment.

Caltrans is a happy customer.

“With some universities, there’s difficulty in getting something you can use,” said Earl Shirley, Caltrans’ chief of new technology, materials and research. “That’s not been the case with ITS at Irvine. . . . We envision a longstanding relationship with them.”

Relocated from UCLA in 1974, most of the institute’s budget at Irvine of $1 million a year comes from state and federal research grants. The money can become politicized, as Recker knows all too well from his experience with the contentious issue of car-pool lanes.

In 1987, the Orange County Transportation Commission hired the institute to determine whether car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway had boosted the freeway’s accident rate. When the institute concluded that there was only a minor increase, Drivers for Highway Safety, a small grass-roots group fervently opposed to car-pool lanes, accused the institute of “cooking” the numbers to please OCTC and Caltrans.

What’s more, the brouhaha persuaded Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) and other lawmakers to block the institute budget for a time during legislative hearings in Sacramento.

Since then, Recker has been skittish about institute involvement in local transportation planning controversies. He said its mission is to produce research that can be applied broadly.

The institute, for example, will not involve itself directly in the debate over OCTA’s plans for an elevated urban rail system.

Instead, Recker said, individual professors can speak out on their own.

“The bottom fell out of transit during the 1980s,” he said, “but it’s coming back. . . . We’re looking at how we can develop a transit system that is integrated with the highway system.”

In the past, he said, transit and highways served distinct purposes and clientele. Now the challenge is to have the public use both interchangeably.

Recker is cautiously optimistic. “We’re in a post-automobile urban area, and we’re not going to get people into fixed-route transit,” he said. “Our urban form (sprawl) isn’t conducive to it.

“But there may be other forms of public transit such as van pools or jitney services--those kinds of things. And maybe now with the sort of communications technology that we have and the control technology, we have for the first time the ability to integrate these various modes into a single system. That’s kind of exciting. So I think transit is going to get a lot more attention.”

The institute’s Irvine brain trust has escaped the ideological labels pinned on other institutes. For example, the USC’s School of Urban Planning has a decidedly pro-highway reputation, while UCLA is thought to lean toward transit.

The ability to defy labels, Recker said, comes from the institute’s interdisciplinary character. For example, civil engineers tend to be highway construction experts, while social scientists tend to be more oriented to transit. In Irvine, neither dominates.

Prof. Kenneth A. Small--a co-author of “Road Work,” a book that in part advocates “congestion fees” for peak-hour use of freeways--said he believes that the interdisciplinary approach of the institute helped him greatly.

“It’s extremely beneficial to have them here,” Small said. “They were very receptive to my ideas.”

Small is studying so-called sub-centers of high employment in the Los Angeles area with USC Prof. Genevieve Giuliano, formerly of UC Irvine. The research is related to theories that jobs and housing must be better balanced to reduce long commutes.

“One thing we’re finding is that jobs and houses seem to be more balanced than is often believed. . . . Yet even where they’re closely balanced,” she said, “people choose to live several miles from where they work, so you can’t count on close-in housing to solve the transportation problem.”

Still, Small said: “We have to pay attention to the jobs-housing balance. . . . And we have to look at the potential for mass transit in these sub-centers.”

While the institute avoids direct involvement in local highway or transit projects, student members of various professional groups have aided transportation officials in cities from Santa Monica to Newport Beach, Recker said.

And although the county is a perfect transportation laboratory because of its urban environment, Recker said, he does not relish the role of a bedraggled commuter’s would-be savior.

“If I were king? If I had that power, I don’t know what I’d do,” Recker said. “The issues are such that we don’t know the answers, necessarily. . . . I tell my wife that we have to get to Idaho.”