Lack of Use Dooms Lane for Valley Car-Poolers : Commuters: City officials suspend the Sepulveda Boulevard pilot program. Its annual cost of $267,000 couldn’t be justified, they say.

Ultimately, it was those little orange traffic cones that may have brought the car-pool lane on Sepulveda Boulevard to a dead end.

The cones were used to create a northbound lane for about a mile on the southbound side of the street where it crosses Sepulveda Pass, giving homeward-bound car-poolers and buses an unobstructed drive from the Westside into the San Fernando Valley every weekday afternoon.

But Los Angeles transportation officials suspended the pilot program Wednesday, saying the few cars using the lane don’t justify the $267,000 annual cost of the three-person crew that set up, maintained and removed the brightly colored markers.

The city’s Department of Transportation decided last month to discontinue the program, but due to miscommunication the word did not reach the road crew until Wednesday.

Although a final decision on the program has not been made, transportation officials say it is unlikely to be revived.

“So far, the numbers don’t seem to show that the lane attracted a whole lot of car pools,” said city traffic engineer Tim Crowder. “It was an experiment we’ve learned a whole lot from,” he said, indicating that the city would try to avoid repeating the mistakes again.

Nonetheless, Tom Conner, general manager of the transportation department, said the city has not given up on the idea of installing temporary car-pool lanes on surface streets. He said a committee has been formed to identify other streets where such lanes can be added.

The Sepulveda car-pool lane was introduced in 1991 by then-Mayor Tom Bradley as a way to reduce congestion into the Valley and induce motorists to join car pools or ride buses. The lane operated every weekday from 3 to 7 p.m. between Mountaingate and Mulholland drives.

But initial studies showed that the number of cars using the lane was dropping, from 265 vehicles per hour when the lane was established in June, 1991, to 143 vehicles per hour five months later. Transportation officials said more recent figures have yet to be calculated.

In addition to the declining use, Conner said keeping the cones in place was the program’s biggest problem. The crew assigned to set up the cones amid speeding traffic also voiced worries for their safety, he said.

When the program started, the car-pool lane was bordered on both sides by a row of cones, he said. But cars trying to leave the lane would knock the cones about, requiring city road crews to constantly drive up and down the lane, righting the cones, Conner said.

Later, he said, the double row was replaced with a more user-friendly single row of cones on the left side of the added northbound lane, making it easier for motorists to exit the lane. But still the cones were hurled about.

Due to safety concerns, the City Council voted in March to add a third worker at an additional cost of $31,000 a year to drive a truck behind the cone-placers, protecting them from oncoming traffic.

The decision to suspend the program drew fire from Nick Patsaouras, a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who has promoted the idea of using reverse-traffic lanes to ease congestion.

Patsaouras said the decision is “another indication of the incompetence” in the city’s Department of Transportation, which he said should be abolished and its responsibilities assigned to other agencies.

While Patsaouras said the lane would get more use if it were open to all motorists regardless of the number of passengers, Conner said the funding used for the program comes from a sales tax increase that can only be spent on car-pool lanes.

Conner said he has heard from many solo motorists who resent having to maneuver around the scattered cones.

One of those irritated drivers is Mary Richards, an Encino resident who takes Sepulveda to and from her job on the Westside.

“I see it as more of an obstacle course than being anything practical,” she said. “It’s really dangerous, I think.”

The car-pool restriction was “not fair to people who don’t car pool,” she said, and about half of the drivers she saw in the car-pool lane were alone.