Slower, Tougher Driving

It’s no news to drivers on the 405, but regional transit analysts made it official on Thursday: That terrible daily commute is only getting worse.

The average crawl to work on Southland freeways expanded to 34 minutes in newly compiled figures for 1999, two minutes longer than for the previous year. Driving home, a 41-minute battle, required an extra four minutes.

Frustration was up, on both freeways and surface streets. And the hours wasted in traffic, a staggering 1.8 million a day across Southern California, figure to keep piling up unless transit officials can do a better job of promoting carpools, buses and other options, said a report released by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The region expects to add 6.7 million people in the next two decades, the equivalent of two Chicagos. Yet more than 78% of drivers still travel to work alone, according to SCAG’s annual State of the Commute report, based on a survey of 2,925 drivers in six counties.

Orange County commuters ranked among the least-frequent users of carpool lanes and reported higher levels of dissatisfaction with their drives than people in Los Angeles County, the report said. But Orange County officials immediately challenged those findings, saying the statistical margin for error made it impossible to single out that region.

“There’s a real problem here,” Orange County Transportation Authority spokesman George Urch said of the report. “It’s skewed.”

Cheryl Collier, SCAG’s manager of Rideshare Services, acknowledged that dissatisfaction levels might be too close to call, but noted that Orange County historically has ranked low in driver happiness. The poor use of carpool lanes is really a regional problem, she added.

Jammed freeways and surface streets are ruining mornings and evenings from Ventura to San Bernardino.

“I pity the man who has to drive through the Sepulveda Pass every day,” said Los Angeles attorney William Moore, who spends more than an hour a day on the freeways--and often more than two. “It’s just awful going from the Valley to the Westside, and vice-versa.”

Moore, who is able to avoid that chronic bottleneck, needed no government report to tell him that traffic has gotten worse. He has seen the escalating congestion while traveling a triangular circuit from Los Feliz to the courthouse downtown and out to his offices in Calabasas.

The 32-mile trip up the 101 Freeway takes scarcely half an hour at noon, but 90 minutes during the typical morning rush.

“The drive home from Calabasas on a Friday at 5:30 can be grueling,” he said. “It can take two hours if it rains.”

During the three years he has made the loop, the stress of his job--arguing in court--has become increasingly compounded by what he encounters on the road: not just more traffic, but “egocentrics blabbing on their car phones,” he said. And the proliferation of sport utility vehicles. “They make it harder to see,” Moore said. “If you’re driving a Toyota Corolla, you feel like you could be crushed like a bug.”

Stress was experienced “fairly often” or “very often” among 29% of those polled in the SCAG study. The survey found only a slight decline in the average driver’s satisfaction with the daily commute, but travel time was a significant factor in causing some people to move or switch jobs.

Four of every 10 respondents had changed jobs in the last couple of years, and bad traffic influenced about 20% of those job-hoppers, the report said.

Architect Anthony Moretti, who slogs his way from Lomita to the Mid-Wilshire district in Los Angeles, said his own drive has “almost crossed over that threshold,” in large part, he thinks, because of the booming economy, the start of the fall school semester and the ongoing bus strike.

Even before the strike, congestion had grown perceptibly over the past few years. Now, he said, “it’s almost unbearable. In the last several weeks, it’s as bad as it’s ever been.”

Moretti’s drive has gone from about 50 minutes to about 70. Half the time he carpools, using the diamond lane on the 110 Freeway. But when he drives alone, he avoids the freeway, even though it’s the most direct route.

“To take the Harbor Freeway by yourself is pretty much not an option,” he said. “It’s bumper to bumper. . . .”

Not every area experiences such in-your-face stress. In more rural Ventura County, for example, drivers reported far less anxiety than in Los Angeles or Orange counties, even though the average travel time there jumped to 33 minutes, from 30 the year before.

Ventura commuters, like those in Riverside County, registered their biggest complaints with surface streets. In both areas, at least 35% of those surveyed said street traffic had grown worse.

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Times staff writers Monte Morin and Matt Surman contributed to this report.

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On the Road Again--Alone

Commuters in Southern California spent more of their day on the road last year and didn’t have a passenger to complain about it to--more than three-quarters of them hit the road alone, according to a study released Thursday.

Source: Southern California Assn. of Governments