‘New Economy’ Puts Commuting Paths in Reverse

With “new economy” job centers popping up in pricey suburbs--and young families pushing into the desert and mountains in the search for affordable housing--commuting patterns that once defined Los Angeles are being turned upside down.

Downtown Los Angeles, which historically has been the hub of car, bus and rail traffic in the five-county metropolitan region, still gets its share of heavy traffic, as any commuter to the Civic Center well knows.

But these days, as traffic volume picks up with expansion of the economy and growth in jobs, it is not unusual for traffic to be even heavier elsewhere.

The shift is particularly noticeable on the Santa Monica Freeway going away from downtown.

For generations, the heaviest morning traffic on the overcrowded Santa Monica Freeway went east, toward downtown Los Angeles. Now, in a turnabout that has caught some by surprise, traffic runs most heavily to the west, feeding into Santa Monica and the Westside.

“Normally, you would expect everyone going downtown in the morning and out of town at night,” said Caltrans traffic engineer Nick Jones. “It’s not that way.”

Changes in commuting trends are in evidence over a broad area. Consider:

* Traffic volumes on the Riverside Freeway into Orange County are rivaling those on the heavily traveled San Diego Freeway between Los Angeles and Orange counties.

* Although traffic on the Ventura Freeway still flows relatively freely in the west San Fernando Valley, Caltrans is noticing a build-up going into Ventura County in the morning, in contrast to the traditional heavier flow toward Los Angeles.

* A Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus line from downtown to the west Valley’s Warner Center carries 1,700 riders outbound, about 350 inbound. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation reports a similar split on buses it runs to the Valley. “Every bus is full,” said James Okazaki of the department. “We have been having to add buses over the last year.”

* Billed as the first ever suburb-to-suburb commuter rail service, Metrolink began running trains from San Bernardino to San Juan Capistrano in Orange County in 1996. Since then, the line has grown from four trains a day to 11, and in the first 20 days of March it showed a 16% increase in riders, compared with a 13% jump systemwide during a comparable period.

Two chief reasons are cited for the shake-up in traditional traffic flows. One is middle-class workers’ constant pursuit of affordable housing. The other is the burgeoning economy, including the growth of so-called “new economy” jobs in computer software, Internet start-ups and biotechnology.

With the explosion of “new economy” positions, communities such as Santa Monica and Irvine are turning into commuter destinations, in some cases their populations swelling dramatically during the day, then collapsing at night.

The problem is that the communities that are sometimes the strongest job centers often have housing prices beyond the reach of middle-class workers. The combination of pricey housing, driven in part by zoning that restricts the height or density of residential buildings, and an open-door policy to “new economy” employers, creates a separation of home and workplace that makes long commutes inevitable.

Flexibility Helps Avoid Rush Hour

Consider Frankie Gutierrez, whose long commute from his apartment in the Inland Empire to Santa Monica was an easy decision. Four years ago, he landed a job managing construction projects with Symantec Corp., the fast-growing firm that makes Norton anti-virus programs for computers.

Symantec, in Santa Monica’s MGM Plaza complex at Colorado Avenue and Cloverfield Boulevard, helped by giving him flexible hours.

Gutierrez starts for work after the morning rush hour and leaves for home at night. By working around the rush hour, he figures he saves as much as an hour and a half a day. Getting onto the Santa Monica Freeway from the Cloverfield entrance takes only a couple of minutes at night, compared with 15 minutes to go the same three blocks during rush hour, he said.

With Santa Monica experiencing one of the region’s more robust economies, traffic at Colorado and Cloverfield will only get worse because of two commercial developments under construction at the intersection.

“With no traffic, it takes an hour,” Gutierrez said of the 55-mile, one-way commute on the Santa Monica and San Bernardino freeways. When it rains or there is an accident, even leaving late doesn’t help. “There are days when it takes me three hours to get home.”

Still, he said, the commute is worth it. One reason is that by living in Upland, Gutierrez gets a much bigger apartment for far less than would be possible in Santa Monica. Another is that he can help raise his 2-year-old son.

“The only reason it works is that the company I am with is very flexible,” Gutierrez said. “Otherwise, it would be very stressful.”

Caltrans said the average morning commute eastbound on the Santa Monica Freeway, from the San Diego Freeway interchange to downtown, recently was 19 minutes, whereas the westbound commute was 23 minutes. In the afternoon commute, the numbers were: eastbound, 24 minutes; westbound, 18 minutes.

“We call it the congealed Westside,” said Jack Kyser, an economist with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. who tracks business activity in the region. “The Westside now is the hottest office market in all of Los Angeles County.”

He said similar patterns of new economic growth were affecting Ventura and Orange counties.

“There has been a lot of shifting out of what we call the recognized centers to the unrecognized centers,” said Kyser.

Santa Monica’s daytime population swells to between 150,000 and 200,000 people, including tourists, from its permanent population of 92,000, according to city officials.

Orange County’s Irvine, with 110,330 residents, bills itself as Southern California’s technology center. With 289,012 people holding down jobs in the city as of the end of 1999, its population more than doubles every day.

In Ventura County, biotechnology giant Amgen Inc. of Thousand Oaks contributes to a reversal of what once was a lopsided commuter trek from Ventura County into Los Angeles County.

From its beginning with three employees in 1980, Amgen has grown into one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies, with 6,000 workers worldwide, 5,000 of them in Ventura County. The firm plans to add 1,500 employees worldwide this year, many of them at its 120-acre Ventura campus.

With the median price of a house in Thousand Oaks at $342,000, according to a city study, homeownership is beyond the reach of most middle-class families, an increasingly common trend in Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange counties.

According to the California Assn. of Realtors, the affordability of homes in Southern California is at historic lows. An index that measures the ability of households to buy a median-priced home showed that in February, only 28% of households in Orange County could afford a median-priced home, compared with 35% in Ventura County and 36% in Los Angeles County.

As new technology jobs have been created, more workers have been forced to seek affordable housing in places like San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Many of those workers bypass downtown Los Angeles for jobs in such places as the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and Orange County.

As families follow the “For Sale” signs farther and farther out, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are converting farm and grazing land into urban development at the rate of about 500 acres a month.

There used to be a real estate axiom that home prices in the San Fernando Valley would drop $1,000 a mile the farther west you went along the Ventura Freeway. Now the same yardstick is being used to describe the drop in housing prices along the Interstate 10 corridor from the San Gabriel Valley into the Inland Empire.

“It’s incredible, it’s awful,” complained Assemblyman Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino). “My district empties out to Los Angeles and Orange counties every morning and returns late at night.”

Areas Lack Sense of Community

One complaint Leonard hears is that commuters leave home before the morning newspaper arrives and get home too late for school board and civic meetings. As a result, the veteran legislator said, there is “much less sense of community in my cities.”

Most residents of San Bernardino and Riverside counties spend less than one hour commuting to and from work, but 16% commute more than two hours a day, according to a new study by San Bernardino Associated Governments.

It is not unusual to find commuters trekking in from the mountain community of Wrightwood, the High Desert area around Victorville, even Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, San Bernardino County planners say.

“Sometimes you find it disconcerting to find commuters on roads you would never expect to find them on,” said Ken Miller, director of transportation for San Bernardino County. Miller said the county had to put speed bumps in one subdivision because congestion was so bad on the Pomona Freeway that commuters were getting off and turning residential streets into raceways.

In north Los Angeles County, city officials in Palmdale estimate that 50,000 commuters pour out of the Mojave Desert into the Los Angeles Basin each day.

With commuters willing to put up with 60- and 70-mile commutes each way, the crush of traffic from the Antelope Valley is so heavy on Highway 14, a divided two- and three-lane road, that impatient commuters are getting off the freeway and taking rural and mountain roads, through Bouquet Canyon and Sand Canyon to the wider Interstate 5.

Commuters from Palmdale are even finding the Angeles Forest Highway, a winding, two-lane mountain road. In the mornings, long lines of cars head south on the highway from Palmdale, destined for the Foothill Freeway in La Canada Flintridge. In the evenings, the cars go the opposite direction in classic commuter patterns that seem out of place in the remote and isolated mountain region, which is devoid of gas stations, fast-food franchises or other commuter-friendly services.

There is a small restaurant tucked away among the canyons, the appropriately named Hidden Cafe. Only a few cars stop.

“They are much too busy getting where they want to go to stop,” said a waitress, looking out at the cars whizzing by on their way to Palmdale.

Upheavals in the aerospace industry have contributed to the topsy-turvy commuting patterns that have developed.

Defense workers able to save their jobs often faced a choice that boiled down to moving or enduring long commutes, so it is not unknown for a Boeing worker to commute from Long Beach to Palmdale, or a TRW engineer to commute to Redondo Beach from San Bernardino.

Bobby Roberts, 55, an engineer with TRW, once worked at Norton Air Force Base. When Norton closed, TRW offered to relocate him, but he said he didn’t want to leave his home at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. So he carpools with three other TRW workers from San Bernardino to the TRW plant in Carson, starting at 4:15 every morning on the 76-mile, one-way trip.

Having done the commute now for a decade, Roberts is a veteran. He says “traffic continually gets heavier.”

Down in the desert, Markne Wright, a marketing specialist with TRW, complains that her 62-mile, one-way commute from Palm Springs to San Bernardino is getting much worse.

“There is a huge buildup going from San Bernardino to Yucaipa in the afternoon,” she said, “and from Redlands into San Bernardino in the morning.”