Commute Is Getting Tougher

It’s no news to drivers on the 405, but regional transit analysts made it official 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.

And while some transportation officials bristled at the findings and brushed them aside as unscientific, the authors said the report is a simple, straightforward survey of opinions about the daily commuting experience.

Orange County commuters, the SCAG report concluded, ranked among the least-frequent users of carpool lanes and reported even higher levels of frustration with their daily drives. County transportation officials who challenged the study took particular issue with the claim that so few Orange County drivers use carpool lanes. A spokesman for the Orange County Transportation Authority pointed to a study completed only months ago by the California legislative analyst’s office that concluded the county had the highest level of peak-hour carpool lane drivers in the state.

OCTA Takes Issue With Methodology

“There’s a real problem here,” OCTA spokesman George Urch said. “The survey is skewed. The sampling is too small.” The Orange County sampling involved 525 respondents--less than 1% of the county’s total 1.9 million commuters, Urch said.

A SCAG spokeswoman said the study was not intended to be viewed as a scientific report. “It’s a sample survey of opinions and experiences,” said Jill Smolinski. “We’re not standing on top of the freeways and counting bodies.”

Among its conclusions, the SCAG study reported that 80% of Orange County commuters drive alone, and that nearly one in six commute to Los Angeles County. The report also said the average Orange County commute grew from 14 to 16 miles in a one-year stretch and now takes 10 minutes longer.

While commuters in Orange County reported lower levels of satisfaction than their counterparts in other counties, they also told interviewers that traffic flow on freeways is “better than a year ago.”

Such was the view of Jeremy Flores, a sales representative for a gourmet crouton manufacturer in Anaheim. “I think traffic has flowed better here in Orange County because of all the construction that’s finishing up,” said Flores, a 24-year-old San Dimas resident.

Although OCTA officials contested the study’s carpool conclusion, they were not surprised to hear that those Orange County commuters who were interviewed had a dismal outlook on the daily commuting experience. With major roadwork projects still in progress on the Santa Ana, San Diego and Costa Mesa freeways, commuters routinely get stuck in construction slowdowns.

The 2,925 commuters who were interviewed for the study reached a steady conclusion: 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 Hollywood 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 a “fairly often” or “very often” occurrence 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.

Architect Finds Drive ‘Almost Unbearable’

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 Harbor 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