Eyes on the Road

The view from Jorge Jarrin’s office is spectacular. Oh, sure, it’s noisy, a little cramped and it tends to vibrate, but on a clear day you can see Catalina.

Heck, in 20 minutes you can be in Catalina.

For the time being, however, Jarrin will be spending most of his working hours over land--specifically, over the hundreds of miles of congested freeways that make Southern California the home of the most challenging commute in the nation. Which is good news for the thousands of listeners who rely on Jarrin’s daily morning and afternoon drive-time traffic reports to get them to work and back.

“He would unquestionably be the top traffic reporter in town, light-years ahead of whoever would be second,” says KABC-AM (790) morning co-host Ken Minyard. “Wherever we go or whenever we get a chance to have audience reaction, he’s always one of the most popular personalities.”

Though KABC’s on-air lineup has gone through a number of changes during the last year, Jarrin has been a constant presence for 13 years. In fact, his upbeat, whimsical reports every quarter-hour during drive-time have become a featured part of the programming.

He also checks in twice an hour with Spanish-language KLAX-FM (97.9), making him the Southland’s only regular radio personality working in two languages.

But he’s hardly the only recognizable personality working the traffic beat. Southern California’s sprawling suburbs, vast freeway system and inadequate public transportation have conspired to make driving as much a part of the workday as the coffee break. As a result, some radio stations go to great lengths to get up-to-date traffic information on the air.

“We talked to a lot of listeners. We had focus groups,” says George Nicholaw, general manager of all-news station KNX-AM (1070). “The one thing [listeners] all wanted to hear more of was traffic.”

“Traffic definitely shows up in our research,” agrees Richard Heftel of Spanish-language music stations KLVE-FM (107.5) and KSCA-FM (101.9), the two top-ranked stations in the L.A.-Orange County market. “People want to know . . . alternate routes. They want to know if they can roll over and go back to sleep for another half-hour. It’s part of our car culture, our freeway society.”

And it’s become an increasingly competitive segment of radio culture as well. Metro Traffic, for 20 years the main supplier of local traffic information to television and radio stations nationwide, shares the L.A.-Orange County market with Shadow Traffic and AirWatch America. All three services rely heavily on the state Department of Transportation and the California Highway Patrol for much of their information. But to set themselves apart from the competition, supplementing that information with live reports from airborne reporters has become increasingly important.

As a result, the air has become almost as crowded as the freeways, with more than 10 helicopters and a like number of fixed-wing aircraft patrolling a five-county area surrounding downtown Los Angeles, looking for the latest fender-bender.

“It’s important for us to be as prompt as we can possibly be to inform people of a situation that will affect them,” says Nicholaw, whose station gives traffic reports every six minutes.

And if you can’t wait six minutes for a freeway update, Los Angeles has the nation’s only full-time traffic channel, KKTR-AM (1650), which made its debut June 1. It calls itself K-Traffic.

“I’ve personally been waiting a long time for someone to do this,” says Don Bastida of Santa Ana-based AirWatch America, which supplies K-Traffic with its reports. “And L.A. is the perfect place. In California, cars are king.”

In the air, however, Jarrin is the ruling monarch. Among the deans of airborne traffic reporting, Jarrin is also a news reporter, having earned numerous prizes, including an Associated Press award for his aerial coverage of the civil disturbances after the verdict in the first trial of the LAPD officers accused of beating motorist Rodney G. King.

He’s the second Jarrin to be honored for riot coverage; his father, Jaime Jarrin, was recognized for his reporting from East Los Angeles during rioting in August 1970. Last month, Jaime Jarrin, 63, for four decades the Spanish-language voice of the Dodgers, was honored again, this time with induction into the broadcast wing of baseball’s Hall of Fame. That’s an encore Jorge Jarrin, 43, will find difficult to match.

Nevertheless, the younger Jarrin owes his start in broadcasting in part to his father’s long affiliation with the Dodgers. He was visiting his father at Dodger Stadium in 1985 when he ran into Bud Furillo, then host of a sports talk show on KABC. Jorge Jarrin had worked for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, and the one-year anniversary of the 1984 Games was approaching, so Furillo invited him to the show to discuss the Olympic legacy.

George Green, then the president and general manager at KABC, heard the show, fell in love with Jarrin’s dulcet tones and clear delivery and, within days, offered him a job that had been vacant since Kelly Lange left the station for television news.

Perhaps that’s why Jarrin carries a beaded Dodger key chain in his pocket, and it’s probably why the team was on his mind last Wednesday morning as he climbed into the cockpit beside pilot Aldo Bentivenia to begin a repetitious three-hour tour of the L.A. basin.

“Things don’t look too good for the Dodgers right now,” he said and sighed. Clutching a sports page in one hand and balancing a cup of coffee between his knees, Jarrin looked little much like the ground-bound commuters below. Traffic is light on this morning, as it usually is this time of year. After 13 years of tracking such things, Jarrin has discovered some trends.

“August is traditionally the lightest traffic month of the year,” he says. “It doesn’t really get bad until after Labor Day.”

The morning drive looks a lot different from 800 feet above the freeway. Even though much of the basin is socked in by fog, alternate routes are easy to plot and developing problems are easy to spot. Well, they would be easy to spot if there were any. Responding to a CHP report of an overturned vehicle near LAX, we arrive to find that the problem has been moved to the shoulder and traffic is flowing freely.

A few minutes later, we follow the 710 Freeway north to where it collides with the 5 Freeway to check out another problem. But the only thing unusual we encounter is the pungent odor that wafts from the slaughterhouses and rendering plants below.

“You really can’t smell that on the ground,” Jarrin says, “because the smell rises. Then it gets trapped by the same inversion layer that holds in the heat. Some days it’s worse than others.”

Through it all, Jarrin keeps up an almost constant chatter with the producers at Metro Traffic and the KABC morning team of Minyard and Peter Tilden, with whom he discusses swing jazz, Zoot suits and the upcoming NASCAR street race around the Coliseum.

“He is a full member of the show and an important contributor to it,” says Minyard.

Oh, and he mixes in some occasional traffic news too. About the most exciting thing we encounter all morning is a pair of loose dogs on the 105 Freeway near Wilmington Avenue. Three CHP officers are unable to corral the strays, who eventually stop all westbound traffic, backing things up for miles.

Jarrin does a live report for KABC, as does another cockpit companion, Metro Traffic’s Michael Dean, who is filling in for Rudy Grande as the traffic reporter for KBIG-FM (104.3). Soon other copters crowd our airspace, elbowing their way in for a closer look.

“Even though we’re competitive, we get together,” Jarrin says of his rivals. “I don’t mind exchanging information with them.”

Once the dogs leave the freeway, we leave as well, following the Long Beach Freeway back toward downtown before cutting through the Cahuenga Pass and heading back to Van Nuys Airport.

When he files his final report of the morning, just after 9 a.m., Jarrin is hovering a few feet above a grass lot just off the tarmac.

To many of those listeners, he was never high above the freeway anyway. He was in their radio, just as he has been for the last 13 years. And sometimes just having a familiar voice in the car with you is the best way to ride out a traffic jam anyway.