L.A. Traffic Puts the Skids to Whatever Accuracy ‘Rush Hour’ Once Carried

Defining it is just about as difficult as avoiding it these days.

Just exactly when is rush hour?

If you ask attorney Nellwyn Voorhies, who takes the Santa Monica Freeway into Downtown Los Angeles five days a week, it runs from 7:45 to 9:30 a.m. and from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

If you want the official word from Caltrans, peak hours last even longer--from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 3 to 7 p.m.

For the most drastic view, talk to Jill Angel, the former California Highway Patrol sergeant who has been a traffic reporter for a decade. From her perspective, rush hour in our increasingly congested region is an all-day event.

Why the differences of opinion? Part of the answer lies in whether, like Voorhies, you focus on a specific stretch of freeway or, like Angel, you look at the county’s entire 528-mile freeway network.

But the definitions all have one thing in common: They demonstrate that, as a term of art, rush hour is a misnomer.

“It’s not an hour, and nobody rushes anywhere,” says Caltrans spokesman Russell Snyder. “It’s an oxymoron.”

Which leads to the obvious question: Was rush hour ever really as brief as its name implies? If so, when did the phrase slip from the mooring of its original meaning to suggest the vaguer notion of time it connotes today?

The answers are as nebulous as the phrase.

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Some etymological sleuthing shows that the English language recorded its first rush hour a century ago, about when American and British inventors hit on the idea of powering a four-wheeled vehicle with a motor.

But it is difficult to tell whether those who coined the phrase truly meant 60 minutes or whether they used hour metaphorically, as Winston Churchill did in describing the Battle of Britain as that nation’s “finest hour.”

The first reference to rush hour in the Oxford English Dictionary actually uses the plural: A British journal article from 1898 speaks of “trailer cars (that) can be put on during the ‘rush hours,’ mornings and evenings.”

The term, in the singular and plural, caught on quickly on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, as early as 1907 the author O. Henry was able to write about “the ‘rush-hour’ tide of humanity.” In 1926, a London newspaper captured the plight of the modern masses with a photograph of the “traveling discomforts” of “ ‘rush hour’ at Earl’s Court.” By the 1930s, the word combination of rush hour had become common enough to stand without quotation marks.

There is no clear mention, though, of the precise duration of rush hour or what times of day it began and ended.

For that, perhaps only the memories of people like Nick Jones, a Caltrans engineer for the past 31 years, can supply the answer.

According to Jones, rush hour in Los Angeles indeed spanned 60 minutes--sometimes less--when he first started working for the state transportation agency. Most motorists hit the road from 7 to 8 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m. each day, give or take half an hour, he said.

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But as the region grew, commuting time burgeoned as well, and by the early 1970s Caltrans abandoned the imprecise rush hour for the current official phrase, peak period . Now, peak period has expanded to the point where it swallows up seven hours of the day--enough time to drive from here to Phoenix in unfettered traffic.

Signs on local roadways bear witness to Caltrans’ definition of the busy morning and afternoon periods.

On the eastbound Simi Valley Freeway, a marker advises motorists that the left shoulder can be used as an extra lane between 6 and 9 a.m. Monday through Friday along a three-mile stretch starting at Kuehner Drive. Likewise, workers heading home from 3 to 7 p.m. on the southbound Santa Ana Freeway can press the right shoulder into service for a few miles in Norwalk.

Veteran radio traffic reporter Bill Keene remembers how gridlock hours steadily grew over the 18 years he spent on the air warning motorists of accidents, snarls and spills.

“When I first started, at 5 o’clock in the morning you were on an abandoned freeway. By the time I left, at 5 o’clock in the morning the rush hour was under way,” says Keene, who retired to Arizona in 1993. “And there used to be a definite cutoff at 6 in the evening. We’d let the tie loose, sit back. Now at 6 you’re in the heart of it.”

On several freeway segments, traffic does not let up even outside Caltrans’ peak hours--on the four-level interchange in Downtown, the San Diego Freeway on the Westside and the Santa Monica Freeway almost for its entire length.

In fact, for thousands of motorists, the concept of rush hour approaches the bleak view of Angel: It essentially begins at sunrise and continues unabated until sunset. Even Caltrans acknowledges that if the number of cars keeps growing, the official morning and evening peak periods will merge in the middle of the day to create an uninterrupted traffic nightmare.

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If heavy traffic does clog roadways around the clock, then what is to become of those two words, rush hour ? Will the phrase be just an anachronism, quaint but useless to describe modern reality?

It’s a possibility, maybe even a likelihood. In the eyes of some, it’s already happened.

“There’s no such thing as rush hour anymore,” Angel says.