Honey, I’m Home!

You’ve probably noticed how much Southern California’s traffic congestion has improved, right? According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s new report, Los Angeles County and Orange County residents wasted five fewer hours in rush-hour traffic in 2003 than the year before.

Of course, we’re still the nation’s most congested area -- each of us squandering 93 hours of life annually drumming our fingers on the steering wheel and refusing to make eye contact with nearby humans.

In second place, naturally, were those poor schlubs in the Bay Area, who got to waste only 72 hours in unnecessary congestion. Riverside and San Bernardino counties settled for a ninth-place tie with Orlando at 55 hours, barely more than two days of productive time erased forever. San Diego was a laughable 15th, with only 52 wasted hours. Americans burned 2.3 billion extra gallons of fuel going nowhere and blew 3.7 billion hours sitting on a non-moving car seat instead of a non-moving couch.

It’s good to know that when forest fires, landslides, droughts, deluges and earthquakes let us down in the suffering department, we can still count on useless sitting in traffic to keep our spirits from soaring too high.

This yearly study by the transportation institute, which is about as far from the 405/10 mess as you can get and still be in Texas, had previously been a perennially climbing index of motorist misery.

However, a faltering economy and a few creative municipal measures like synchronized stoplights combined to produce unexpected urban congestion declines. Also, additional people rode something called buses, large vehicles designed mainly for advertising but also capable of carrying more people than even a Hummer.

We’re not too worried, but if this traffic improvement continues in Southern California, how will we ever fill all those extra hours? Take up knitting? Chess? Drag the dinner hour back to 6?

More important, could the region’s social fabric handle the loss of that quiet private time behind the wheel for additional hours of stressful family togetherness? We’d have to talk more with each other -- and not be on a cellphone doing it. Maybe we’d actually have to listen to each other, too.

Not to mention the extra hours of drain time on the remote control batteries.