School’s In, but Is Traffic Up? : Transportation: The resumption of classes doesn’t necessarily mean more congestion, says a Caltrans official.

Now that you’ve survived the holiday weekend traffic crush, the real post-Labor Day commuting grind begins. Or does it?

Conventional wisdom is that with the end of summer, kids return to school, offices fill up, and with that the commuting nightmare begins anew after a summertime lull.

Take Michael Collins of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, who passionately argues that is the case.

Collins is already getting ready for the Wednesday start of the Los Angeles Unified School District year, when 490 schools open, 2,000 school buses will be on the street, and the majority of 32,000 teachers will be commuting again.

Seeing the traffic crunch coming the way a good outdoorsman senses the coming of a killer storm, Collins already has his alternative route prepared.

The gist of it is that, after public school starts, Collins will go way out of his way to avoid traffic when he takes his 10-year-old daughter, Lexy, to school at Immaculate Heart in the Los Feliz district. He will go way past his usual freeway offramp, get on the Golden State Freeway, then double back.

“It’s much longer, but it saves a ton of time,” he said, convinced, like many Southern Californians, that he has a secret answer to traffic congestion. “The traffic pattern just dramatically changes the day public school starts. It’s a piece of cake in August and it’s horrible in September.”

But, according to the California Department of Transportation, the peak volume on local highways occurs during July and August, when tourists and vacationers take to the highways to see local attractions.

“Your peak month is almost always August,” said Nick Jones, a Caltrans transportation engineer.

Who is right here?

Jones says Collins isn’t entirely off base.

Because tourists and people on vacation generally roll out of bed later, stay up later, and are more apt than normal commuters to use freeways at off hours, you may not have noticed all that extra traffic, Jones said.

Indeed, working stiffs continuing their normal commute may actually experience a less stressful traffic grind, Jones said.

“The busiest days are in August, but as far as congestion, it may be slightly down,” Jones said.

But, alas, the end of the Labor Day holiday means everything gets back to normal, and traffic becomes more concentrated during peak commuting hours in the morning and afternoon.

“The nine months that school is in session is normal. The three months of summer are abnormal. We’re just getting back to normal,” Jones said of what to expect after Labor Day.

Complicating the post-holiday commute will be dozens of Caltrans construction projects underway throughout the Los Angeles region. In just Ventura and Los Angeles counties, Caltrans employs 2,300 people, and the largest group, 1,409, work in construction and maintenance.

Migrants to Southern California from “bad weather” states may remember Labor Day as the time when highway construction projects begin to taper off as engineers brace for rain, wind and ice.

Here, the highway construction season is pretty much year-round.

Looking ahead, the worst of it in Los Angeles County will be along the San Bernardino Freeway in the eastern portion of the county.

Caltrans is already circulating maps advising motorists to begin thinking about using alternative routes, like the Pomona Freeway to the south or U.S. 66 to the north, because of congestion and delays when a resurfacing project begins to peak in the fall.

During one weekend in October, still to be decided, Caltrans will close a 3.3-mile segment of the San Bernardino Freeway for a 55-hour period, running from 10 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday.

Those times sometimes are moving targets. On Friday, as the Labor Day weekend began, Caltrans missed its 5 a.m. finishing time for a construction project on the westbound Riverside Freeway in Orange County and kept lanes closed well into the morning rush hour commute, creating a massive traffic snarl.

Major freeway construction projects in Orange County will continue this fall on the Riverside Freeway and a 9.5-mile stretch of the Santa Ana Freeway in the cities of Orange, Anaheim, Fullerton and Buena Park.

Another adjustment period for motorists will come with the end of daylight saving time in late October.

The problem is particularly acute in the westbound lanes of the Ventura Freeway.

“When the time changes, it is really a mess out there,” said Jones. “Many motorists find themselves driving right into the sun. It takes a week or so for everyone to adjust.”

That adjustment period will end just in time for the holiday season that gets underway in November and December, among the lightest traveled months on local freeways, though even then traffic can be a nightmare.

“Orange County freeways are so heavily traveled that I don’t know that we ever have a ‘light’ month,” said Caltrans spokeswoman Rose Orem.