Offering Stranded Drivers a Shoulder

Beneath the armrest of Oscar Blas’ impeccably clean tow truck, there is a card with a portrait of Jesus Christ. It says Guia mi carro (guide my car).

For further protection, Blas always prays and crosses himself when his shift starts at 6 a.m. Given the dangers of Blas’ job as a Metro Freeway Service Patrol driver, he can use all the divine help he can get.

Roaring, racing vehicles pass inches away from him as he changes a tire or pops the hood of a stranded car on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway. Every few months, passing big rigs knock off his truck’s side-view mirrors.

The hazards can be deadly. Last June, Ricardo Arturo Hernandez, 24, became the first and only Freeway Service Patrol driver to die in the line of duty. He was hit by a careening car as he prepared to fix a flat tire on the Golden State Freeway a few miles north of downtown.

Outside the truck, Blas glances at traffic every two to three seconds.

“The most important thing is to not turn your back on traffic,” said Blas, 26, a native of Guatemala who is married and has two young children.

Launched in 1991, the Freeway Service Patrol was designed to fight traffic congestion. About 150 tow trucks roam 411 miles of freeway in Los Angeles County, looking to haul stranded cars away before rubberneckers can cause backups.

Patrol drivers help about 350,000 motorists a year, usually within five minutes after a breakdown, said Al Martinez, who oversees the program for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The patrol’s $20-million annual budget is funded mostly by the county’s gas tax surcharge, with $5 million coming from the state Department of Transportation. Private tow operators under contract with the MTA pay drivers like Blas between $8 and $13 an hour, without any towing quotas.

Trolling a nine-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway from Studio City to Tarzana, Blas is always on the lookout for stalled cars, although motorists can also summon his help by using a freeway call box or dialing 911.

Brushes with danger are part of the job. As Blas was helping a woman on the shoulder one day, a big rig blasted off his truck’s side-view mirror, splattering him with shards of glass.

Blas stood in front of his truck for a few minutes, catching his breath. The woman, whom he had told to sit in his truck while he repaired her car, screamed in terror.

“If I hadn’t put her in the truck, he would’ve run her over,” said Blas, of Sun Valley. “The truck never stopped and possibly didn’t notice.

“This job is very dangerous, if you’re not careful . . . but you have to make a living somehow, right?” Blas added. “I like to drive; I like to help people.”

*

It’s 6:15 p.m. on a Wednesday when Blas spots a couple standing next to a 1979 Ford Mustang alongside the freeway. The driver, a 22-year-old carwash worker named Fernando Salazar, said he and his wife, Angie, were headed home when the engine overheated.

“I can’t do anything to the car. All I want to do is pull it off the freeway,” said Salazar, of Van Nuys. “Imagine if this happened in the middle of the freeway, without help, without these guys?”

Blas and another worker quickly hooked the Mustang to a tow truck and dropped off the couple at a motel on Burbank Boulevard, near gas stations and pay phones.

Salazar said he’d call his cousin, a mechanic, for help. Then Salazar grabbed his wife’s purse and took out some crumbled dollar bills to give Blas. But Blas said the rules bar him from taking tips. When motorists insist, the cash goes into a “tip account,” currently worth about $2,000, that is controlled by the towing contractors who work for the Freeway Service Patrol. The money is set aside for drivers who are killed or injured.

Later, Blas says that Salazar is typical of the drivers he helps--people without an auto club membership or a cellular phone. Many are young working-class immigrants, trying to make do with humble, aging rides from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Blas, a patrol driver for five years, said he has noticed more new cars on the freeways lately. He thinks the change has lightened his workload, but he still helps between 13 and 20 motorists a day.

Passing motorists don’t always take kindly to others’ misfortune, however. “They yell, ‘Get another car. Send it to the junkyard,’ ” he said.

What those drivers may not realize is that the Freeway Service Patrol makes commuting easier for all drivers. About half of the incidents that cause freeway snarls are the kinds of things the patrol can quickly clear up, such as crashed and stalled vehicles and roadway spills, said Tom Choe with the Caltrans office of traffic management.

Although traffic has grown by about 3% a year, congestion has remained steady during the last decade, in part due to innovations like the Freeway Service Patrol, Choe said. Safety is another issue, because there is such scant shoulder space on freeways today, Choe said. Ironically, most L.A. freeways were built with roomy shoulders up to 10 feet wide, he noted. But to accommodate more traffic, engineers cut into shoulder space to add lanes.

Stranded drivers are also vulnerable to thefts, robberies, assaults and rear-end accidents, said California Highway Patrol Officer Brad Davis, who works with the Freeway Service Patrol.

“At 70 mph, all it takes is a couple of seconds of inattention and you could have a rear-end collision,” Davis said.

The Automobile Club of Southern California also supports the program and doesn’t view it as competition, a spokesman said.

“The Freeway Service Patrol is there to take you off the freeway, not anywhere else. We’re for what’s safer for motorists,” AAA spokesman Jeffrey Spring said. “People will call a tow truck or the AAA anyhow from that point.”

*

On the Ventura Freeway, Blas listens to his radio and a CHP scanner; beneath goggle sunglasses, his eyes search for drivers in trouble.

Often Blas encounters motorists on the right shoulder reading maps or talking on their cell phones, and tells them to move on. On a recent Friday morning he found a man in a Honda Passport who was trying to fix his electric shaver.

“We see a lot of things here that don’t make sense,” Blas said. He keeps to 55 mph in the slow lane, contending with drivers who sometimes honk, tailgate or flash high beams: “I don’t pay attention to them. This is where I work.”

Roaming the freeways, Blas has seen the best and worst in human nature. Some, for example, complain that one free gallon of gas, the most he can give to drivers who run out of fuel, isn’t enough to get them where they’re going.

Then there are others, like Christo Loots, whose 1982 Honda Accord broke down on the Ventura Freeway near Sepulveda Boulevard when he was heading to his pawnshop job. Loots, who recently moved here from South Africa, said he had just bought the car from his boss and figured the problem to be a clogged fuel line.

He was amazed to get free help just 10 minutes after pulling onto the right shoulder.

“I think it’s the only place in the world where they can tow you for free,” said Loots, 30, of Hollywood. “I thought it was a normal tow truck that just wanted money.”