West Meets East’s Commuter Woes

Every morning is a hurry-up-and-wait nightmare for Ventura County commuter Diane Bissonnette.

A year ago, the Santa Barbara restaurateur bought a house in Ventura because it was more affordable. It was only 30 miles from work and her son’s private school. What she didn’t count on was the traffic. Now, she and 8-year-old Lorenzo scramble into their van by 7:30 a.m. and race north up the Ventura Freeway, only to screech to a halt as gridlock greets them at the county line. It’s an hour each way on a good day.

Kevin Huether of Simi Valley doesn’t miss those days. Eight years ago, he commuted an hour east to Pasadena for his job at mortgage lender Countrywide. Over the last decade, his company has moved 4,900 jobs to Simi Valley, including Huether’s. His drive now is less than five minutes.

Census figures released this week show two disparate trends among Ventura County’s 331,000 commuters. While the average drive is less than half an hour each way, it has become a few minutes worse for west county residents as the Santa Barbara workforce has gravitated south toward more affordable housing. At the same time, commutes are improving for residents on the county’s east side, as more jobs are created locally.

Simi Valley respondents said their commute was 29 minutes on average, three minutes shorter than in 1990. Thousand Oaks commuters said their drive each way was about 26 minutes, 42 seconds less than in 1990.

Thousands of east county commuters still drive to work in the San Fernando Valley or downtown Los Angeles. No one disputes that the path is increasingly clogged. Huether said his wife’s commute to Burbank each day is 10 minutes longer than a decade ago.

But experts say the overall decrease suggests that proportionally fewer east county residents are making the long haul into Los Angeles. “There are people who live around the corner from where they’re working and that’s going to offset [census statistics] for someone who’s driving an hour,” said Bill Watkins, executive director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project.

As eastern Ventura County has attracted dozens of sizable employers that offer good pay and career opportunities, Huether and others are finding they have options closer to home, said Gary Wartik, manager of economic development for Thousand Oaks.

A 1999 survey found 57% of working Thousand Oaks residents had jobs in town, up from 40% a decade before. The county’s largest private employer is Thousand Oaks-based biotechnology giant Amgen, which continues to grow. Countrywide in Simi Valley is the second largest private employer. The challenge east county cities face, Wartik said, is to make available more affordable housing. Otherwise, they may find they are importing too much of their workforce, particularly in the service and retail industries, creating a whole new set of traffic problems.

In western Ventura County, economists and transportation officials say other forces are at work. Commute times have increased two minutes on average in Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo.

Population growth has exceeded capacity, creating a bottleneck at the Santa Clara River bridge between Oxnard and Ventura. Bridge expansion over the next few years could ease that problem.

Meanwhile, homeowners in the Santa Clara Valley are finding it takes longer to get to jobs in Los Angeles County. That is mainly because of increased development across the county line around Santa Clarita, halfway or more into their drive.

Drive times went from 23 to 25 minutes in Santa Paula, from 25 to 31 minutes in Fillmore and from 26 to 36 minutes in rural Piru.

But the newest and perhaps most intractable trend is western Ventura County’s growing popularity as a bedroom community for Santa Barbara’s workforce.

In the last three years, as median home prices in Santa Barbara have shot above $500,000, even some upper middle-class families have found themselves priced out of the market.

Instead, people like Bissonnette are flocking to Ventura, north Oxnard and sometimes to Camarillo to buy homes in the $300,000 to $400,000 range, then cramming onto a highway that narrows to two lanes in Santa Barbara.

Watkins, the UCSB economist, has been making the drive from east Ventura to Santa Barbara for several years. “Two years ago, if I left at 7 a.m., everything was fine,” Watkins said. “Now, it’s 45 minutes to the university, and if I hit traffic, an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Transportation officials last summer launched a pilot program offering $2 commuter bus service between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Within months, they had met their three-year goal of 200 passengers a day, said Ginger Gherardi, executive director of the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

But it hasn’t made a dent in congestion. A recent survey found 8,900 Ventura County residents make the Santa Barbara commute. Still, Gherardi said, “Even 200 less cars on the road is a step in the right direction.”

The new census data show a 68% increase in public transportation and taxi service. Even so, only about 1% of commuters reported using such transportation as an alternative to cars. Walking is less popular than a decade ago. And three-fourths of countywide commuters make their drive alone.

For Huether, that drive is “a world of difference” from his commute to Pasadena. “I’ve gained back 10 hours a week of my life,” he said.

For Bissonnette, it’s a test of her will--and her son’s. She admits forcing 1960s tunes on the boy, including lots of Joan Baez. Last week, though, she spilled soup all over the dashboard and fried the stereo when she slammed on the van’s brakes.

The ocean view from Highway 101 is spectacular, but Bissonnette said she doesn’t enjoy it much because she’s so focused on the stop-and-go traffic. “I’ve managed to avoid being in traffic all my life, until now,” she said. “I don’t think I can take it another year. It’s hard on the soul.”