‘Traffic Talk’ Translates Into Tie-Ups Avoided

There’s a SigAlert stacking up traffic on the Four Level and a jackknifed big rig putting a tight squeeze on the Orange Crush. The El Toro Y, meanwhile, is feeling the pressure from some heavy-duty police activity, while the Downtown Slot is filling up because of an overturned roach coach in the No. 3 lane.

You’ve listened to it. You’ve pondered it. You may have even deciphered it. But as anyone with a car radio knows, Southland traffic has a language all its own--an idiom heard, but not always understood, by millions of commuters each day.

Spoken by California Highway Patrol dispatchers, Caltrans engineers and hurried traffic reporters, this ever-evolving patois of slang, nicknames and numerology can sound like so much babble, particularly to the untrained ear.

“When people find out I’m a traffic reporter, the top two questions they ask are: ‘Do you fly in a helicopter?’ and ‘What’s a SigAlert?’” said Lisa Osborne, who became fluent in “traffic talk” as a longtime traffic watcher for news station KFI-AM (640) and now serves as president of Traffic411, a firm that provides traffic maps for the Internet.

“There are a lot of traffic reporters throwing out that term,” said Osborne, “when most people don’t really know what it means.”

We’ll tackle that one shortly. In the meantime, rest assured that the people who bring you bumper-to-bumper coverage are aware of your confusion. Many radio traffic services say they are trying to reform with the most lucid reports they can. But some shorthand is inevitable when you’re packing a region’s worth of traffic into a minute or less.

AirTraffic Communications of Santa Ana--a private broadcasting company that provides reports to 30 Southern California radio stations--tries to discourage its reporters from using so-called “CHP-isms.” So managers of the company established a penalty system two years ago: Every time AirWatch traffic staffers uttered obscure terms they had to drop a quarter in a jar.

Reporters had to give up “traffic hazard” in favor of a more vivid description, say, “A pickup dropped a load of wooden pallets.” Rather than describe accidents in the “No. 2 lane,” they were encouraged to specify “the second lane from the left.”

“We have gotten to the point where we don’t need the jar anymore because we have trained people not to use the words,” said director of operations Don Bastida.

To be sure, the level of attitude and jargon varies from station to station.

When AirWatch Traffic reporter Chris Hughes broadcasts for pop-rock format STAR-FM (98.7), for instance, he might tell drivers: “No breakfast burrito for you this morning because a roach coach is stalled on the northbound 5.” On an Orange County jazz station, the same scene would be described as “a stalled catering truck tying up traffic on the northbound 5.”

Many of the stations adopted a more serious approach a few years back, after a USC study found that drivers can best retain traffic reports when the information is presented in order, from the general to the more specific, as in: “In Costa Mesa on the 405 North at MacArthur there is an accident.”

That just-the-facts style reigns at many all-news stations today, a striking departure from the playfully colloquial approach that venerable KNX-AM (1070) traffic jockey Bill Keene brought to the local airwaves.

Keene, who retired in 1994 and died two years ago, tossed off phrases such as “Poop-Out Hill” and “Malfunction Junction” to describe traffic trouble spots. A motorist knocked off the road by a minor accident had been “left caddywampus to the world,” he liked to say.

A generation of traffic reporters picked up that tone, describing car fires as “carbecues” and rear-end collisions as “bump and crunches.”

“You don’t hear that as much anymore, maybe because people understand they have gone from cute to cliche,” said Osborne of the traffic mapping firm. “People, when they are sitting in traffic, probably don’t think it’s as funny as the person sitting in the studio does.”

Still, 45-second traffic reports require brevity, and many nicknames for freeway locations have become part of the lexicon. For instance: “Orange Crush” for the convergence of the Orange (57), Garden Grove (22) and Santa Ana (5) freeways; “Cahuenga Pass” for the Hollywood (101) Freeway between Barham Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Hollywood; “Four Level” for the interchange of the Pasadena (110) and the Hollywood (101) freeways in downtown Los Angeles; and “El Toro Y” for the spot where the 405 and 5 freeways meet in Irvine.

Other common freeway phraseology has no clear definition. It’s unclear, for instance, where the “Grapevine” actually begins and ends, although most local drivers know it’s the long mountain pass on Interstate 5 that connects Los Angeles and the Central Valley.

And even traffic reporters don’t agree on what constitutes the “Downtown Slot.” Some say it’s the section of the Harbor Freeway between the Santa Monica and Hollywood freeways. Others say the slot is a downtown Los Angeles stretch of Interstate 5, according to Chuck Rowe, a radio reporter who maintains a glossary of traffic terms.

In either case, the name was probably coined by an airborne traffic reporter who noticed how the downtown buildings flanking the freeway made it appear as if the flow of cars was passing through a slot, Osborne said.

To a large extent, the quick-witted KNX traffic anchor Jim Thornton has inherited Bill Keene’s mantel as the reigning pun-meister among radio traffic reporters. He added “Bumper Thumper” and “Four-Letter Interchange” to the lexicon--the latter a derisive reference to the downtown Four Level.

“We do have some fun in here. You have to. It would just drive you crazy otherwise,” said Thornton, who delivers 45 reports on a five-hour shift.

And what about the ubiquitous “SigAlert”? For the record, the CHP defines it as an unscheduled lane closure lasting at least half an hour.

The familiar phrase, universally understood as meaning a bad traffic tie-up, was created in the mid-1950s by LAPD Police Chief William H. Parker as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to broadcast pioneer Loyd C. Sigmon.

Sigmon, in a bid to improve ratings on the radio station he co-owned with Gene Autry, persuaded Parker to participate in an experiment in which officers would alert the station over special shortwave receivers whenever a freeway delay or other emergency was developing.

As local legend has it, the reticent police chief supposedly quipped, “We’re going to name this damn thing ‘SigAlert.’”

And the expression got stuck, just like all the baffled commuters.