COVER STORY : Loads of Woes : Heavy Truck Traffic on the 710 Is a Nightmare for Commuters, but Help May Be on the Way

Hauling a 45-foot container full of children’s clothes down the Long Beach Freeway, the big 18-wheeler hits the dips and valleys on the freeway’s grooved surface like a motorboat cresting a line of small waves.

The truck rattles rhythmically-- whomp-whomp-whomp --as it hustles toward a waiting container ship, which will take the cargo to Central America. Up ahead, cars dodge left and right to make way for the imposing rig.

Driver Edgar Cruz, who plies the Long Beach Freeway two or three times a day, seems to barely notice the wavy action of his 1986 Peterbilt or a Toyota driver’s nervous maneuver in front of him--darting abruptly to the right--as the truck overtakes the little car.

“It’s the worst,” mutters Cruz, 48, referring to the freeway’s surface. “The trucks do it--all the trucks going along here everyday.”

The Long Beach Freeway (Interstate 710), the most direct connection between the Long Beach/Los Angeles ports and the Los Angeles railroad yards, is one of the state’s busiest truck thoroughfares. More than 25,000 trucks a day shuttle back and forth along the freeway’s busy south end.

Trucks batter the surface of the freeway. “It’ll just about bounce your eyeballs out,” says longtime Long Beach resident Karen Adelseck, who travels that stretch frequently.

The trucks also give commuters the heebie-jeebies.

“It’s a little frightening if you’re in a compact car and there’s an 80,000-pound truck next to you with its wheels at eye level,” acknowledges Norman Giller, a Long Beach truck driver who is active in North Long Beach civic affairs.

It’s those wind currents that the big rigs set off as they go barreling past small cars, contends Adelseck, who drives a 1986 Ford Tempo. “Unless you notice they’re coming up past you, they’ll create a kind of vacuum that’ll suck you into it,” she says.

The seething mix of cars and 18-wheelers hauling containers to and from the ports has given the Long Beach Freeway one of the most forbidding reputations in the state. Just about everybody in Long Beach, Carson, Compton, Paramount and other cities along the route seems to have a freeway horror story.

Residents say they have seen big rigs skidding on their sides, creeping truck traffic and multi-vehicle pileups on the roadway.

“There are horrendous accidents on a continuous basis,” says Long Beach Councilman Warren Harwood, who remembers how a tractor-trailer suddenly fishtailed across the lane in front of his car a few years ago.

“If I had been next to it, I would have gotten slapped across the freeway divider,” says Harwood, who recently lost a reelection bid to represent a North Long Beach district that is bisected by the freeway.

In recent years, trucks have tipped over on the freeway, disgorging bubbling tar, groaning cattle and lakes of diesel fuel. They have jackknifed over lane dividers, sideswiped tow trucks and plowed into the backs of cars.

Surely this is the inferno of all freeways, some Long Beach residents say.

In fact, the accident rate on the Long Beach Freeway is “pretty high,” says Larry Loudon, chief of accident investigations for Caltrans.

“The primary causes are speed and the large percentage of trucks,” Loudon said. “There have been some real wingdingers with fatalities involved. People in cars don’t seem to realize that trucks don’t stop on dimes.”

Loudon said he could not say which freeway had the highest accident rate, adding that agency policy prohibits him from giving exact figures.

But the Long Beach Freeway’s reputation as a frightening route for commuters derives more from the intimidating presence of huge trucks looming over family cars than from a frequency of spectacular multi-injury accidents, some law enforcement officials say.

“I can’t remember the last ‘horrendous accident,’ if you mean accidents where there were major injuries,” says Detective Steve Strichart of the accident investigations unit of the Long Beach Police Department.

“A truck goes over on its side and you’ve got a big mess,” says Strichart, whose responsibility includes only the Long Beach section of the freeway. “You’ve got nails and glass all over the place. It looks really bad. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got a lot of injuries.”

Even if the freeway may not be the real-life bumper-car corridor that some Long Beach residents think it is, the traffic--particularly the truck traffic--is building at a daunting pace.

The Port of Long Beach already handles almost 80 million metric tons of cargo a year--much of it shuttled by truck along the Long Beach Freeway to the Los Angeles railroad yards--and that amount is expected to more than double in the next 25 years.

Almost a fifth of the 135,000 vehicles that every day travel the freeway south of Pacific Coast Highway are trucks.

It’s time for some kind of action, transportation officials say, and a couple of proposals are in the works. Officials from the cities that line the freeway are resting their hopes for traffic relief on the Alameda Corridor project, an innovative $1.8-billion plan to bring trains directly to the Los Angeles-area docks and to provide a direct trucking link along Alameda Street between the ports and the Los Angeles railroad yards.

There is a slim chance that construction on new truck lanes along Alameda Street and grade separations for trains could begin as early as next year and be completed by the year 2000, said Gill V. Hicks, general manager of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority.

But the project is still more than $1 billion short in funding, and Union Pacific Railroad has still failed to agree to pay to use the new Alameda Street tracks. Both the Southern Pacific and Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe railroads have signed on with the authority.

If the project is completed, truck traffic on the Long Beach Freeway should be lower, even though port cargo tonnage will be significantly higher, Hicks said.

The idea, which came from a 1984 study by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, is to allow dockside loading of trains as well as to streamline truck deliveries. Among other benefits, air pollution would be reduced by making port transportation more efficient, Hicks said.

Caltrans is also considering adding a truck lane to the Long Beach Freeway, either by widening the freeway or constructing an elevated lane above the current freeway.

Currently, the freeway is a 21-mile ribbon of concrete that stretches north from 7th Street in Long Beach, following the paved channel of the Los Angeles River before slicing across East Los Angeles and ending abruptly in Alhambra.

The dead end at Valley Boulevard--a shock to motorists who have followed signs indicating that they are headed to Pasadena--is a monument to the tenacity of the citizens of South Pasadena and the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno.

Residents and officials of those communities, using legal and political pressure, have successfully blocked the proposed link between the Long Beach Freeway and the Foothill Freeway in Pasadena for more than 30 years.

South Pasadenans argue that the freeway will decimate their little city, slicing it in half and destroying more than 300 buildings, some of them landmark homes.

But when city officials really want to generate some passion against the proposed 6.2-mile freeway link, they cite the freeway’s flood of trucks that could be roaring through various neighborhoods.

Last year, to the annoyance of trucking groups, a Caltrans advisory committee suggested that the freeway extension be built as a truck-free link. But most South Pasadena residents, skeptical of the proposal, continued to envision the freeway as an eight-lane concrete monstrosity with noisy trucks spewing diesel fumes.

“It would economically destroy the city,” said Antonio Rossman, the city’s special freeway counsel.

The $805-million project is awaiting a go-ahead from the California Transportation Commission, after which federal Highway Administrator Rodney Slater must give his approval. Gov. Pete Wilson has directed state transportation officials to take “all necessary steps” to complete the freeway.

The Long Beach Freeway is certainly no scenic route.

A round trip with Cruz between the Sea-Land Shipping Co. terminal in Long Beach Port and an Olympic Boulevard garment factory skirts the back ends of factories and warehouses, passing mountains of gravel and cracker-box apartment buildings.

A row of huge metal structures, bearing spaghetti strands of power lines, marches along next to the freeway. Weeds sprout profusely from empty lots.

Long Beach city officials worry that it is an unsightly gateway to their marketing-minded city.

“It’s not an attractive entrance to the downtown area,” says Deputy Mayor Jeffrey A. Kellogg. “This is the ugly dog of freeways.”

Cruz--a big-rig owner-operator who after 16 years on the road knows the Los Angeles-area freeway system intimately--and other truck drivers find little that is charming on the freeway, particularly when it comes to traffic. “It’s not so bad right now,” Cruz said last week, surveying the midmorning traffic from his perch behind the driver’s wheel, 10 feet above the roadway. “But in the morning, it’s a mess.”

In fact, during peak hours--between 7 and 9 a.m. and 4 and 5 p.m.--there are often backups of trucks waiting to deliver loads, like a double row of boxcars, stretching along the freeway from the entrance to the big container terminals to Pacific Coast Highway, a mile away.

Trucking companies say the limited hours of operation at the docks add to traffic problems. Because of high nighttime labor costs, most terminal gates open at 8 a.m. and close at 5 p.m. In Long Beach, only Sea-Land operates evening shifts.

“We’re all out there at the same time,” says Jackie Mattare, owner of Desert Express Trucking Co. “We’re trying to get back to the pier before it closes, just when everybody else is trying to get home from work. We’re part of the problem.”

As far as some motorists are concerned, that’s the understatement of the year.

“It’s gotten so that if I have to travel any distance, I’ll go on Saturday or Sunday just to avoid the trucks,” says Beth Wilburn, who lives near the freeway in North Long Beach.

“Go 55 in the truck lanes (the two right lanes to which trucks are relegated on most freeways) and you’ll get run over,” added Martha Croft, president of the Hamilton chapter of the North Long Beach Neighborhood Assn. “I’ve had them tailgate me right on my bumper, a big rig that probably couldn’t stop in half a mile.”

Law enforcement officers charged with reducing hazardous conditions on the freeway trace many of the problems back 14 years to the deregulation of the trucking industry by the federal government.

The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which allowed virtually anyone with a truck to compete for shipping jobs, created a system of cutthroat competition in the industry, truckers and law enforcement officials say.

Independent truckers found themselves stuck with lower shipping rates and lower profits, says Officer Ed Duer, who patrols the freeway for the Long Beach Police Department.

“With all of that came a decline in maintenance,” Duer says. “A trucker will support his family before he maintains his equipment.”

Trucking industry representatives concede that there has been a slew of bankruptcies since deregulation was instituted, as rates fell and costs rose. But safety standards, enforced by hundreds of thousands of new roadside inspection stations, have risen greatly, they say.

“Truck safety is better than it’s ever been,” says John Doyle, spokesman for the Virginia-based American Trucking Assn., which represents more than 90% of the industry. The number of inspection stations in the country has increased from 35,000 in 1981 to 1.7 million last year, he said.

Still, during a morning shift, Duer easily identifies faulty equipment and overloaded trucks on the Long Beach Freeway. The officer, who carries portable scales in the rear of a Police Department pickup truck, pulls over 18-wheelers with sloppily fastened rear doors or tires that are worn to the steel cord.

“Lose that tire at speed and it could present a problem,” Duer tells one trucker while writing a citation.

When he finds an unlicensed driver or a truck that could be hazardous to others, Duer calls a tow truck to haul the offending vehicle to an impound yard.

No one loathes the Long Beach Freeway more than the tow truck drivers who work on it. Jeff Hogan, a driver with City Towing, which hauls vehicles that have been impounded by the police, recalled a memorable experience on the freeway two years ago.

As he sought to hook up a car on the freeway’s right shoulder, a racing truck bore down. “He ripped the side mirror off and kept on going,” Hogan said.

“I’d rather work anywhere but the 710,” Hogan said.

The first thing Sal Avalos did after he got his job as a tow truck driver with Number One Towing on Long Beach Boulevard was to get life insurance.

“I have a 3-year-old kid I’d like to get home to,” said Avalos, 23. “That’s the worst freeway in the world out there.”

But the ongoing wrangle between truckers and car drivers (“four-wheelers,” the truckers call them) is something like the longtime feud between cattle ranchers and sheepherders, which featured sweeping allegations by both sides.

“I’m bothered greatly by comments about ‘monster trucks,’ when I have to deal with a lot of people who are less than competent in cars,” said trucker Giller, who is also president of the Northwest chapter of the North Long Beach Neighborhood Assn.

Truckers have their own stories about being cut off by motorists or forced to swerve in precarious situations.

“Car drivers should have to take the truck test” to get their driver’s licenses, contends Mattare of Desert Express Trucking. “A lot of drivers don’t realize it takes two lanes for a truck to get around a corner. If a 53-footer is swinging around a corner and a car gets up under him--forget it.”

When it comes to backups and accidents, the perception is usually worse than the reality, Strichart contends.

One recent morning, the northbound freeway lanes in Long Beach were clogged with traffic, with cargo-laden trucks and work-bound commuters inching along, their drivers peering ahead wretchedly.

The source of the backup, they soon learned, was not an overturned semi or a multi-vehicle smashup but an overheated car, stalled in the middle lane.

On the tightly packed Long Beach Freeway, much of the southern end of it a mere three lanes wide, it doesn’t take a major accident to clog things up, Strichart says.

“You can have a fender-bender at Willow,” he says, referring to a street three miles north of downtown Long Beach, “and back things up to the harbor.”