Testing of Car-Pool Lanes on 55 Freeway Extended 9 Months

The trial period for the controversial car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway was extended nine months on Monday by the Orange County Transportation Commission.

Despite strong criticism from Drivers for Highway Safety, a group of motorists, the panel voted 5 to 0 to approve the extension as recommended earlier by the Route 55 Citizens Advisory Committee and the California Department of Transportation.

Although passage had been considered a certainty, members of Drivers for Highway Safety attended Monday’s commission meeting and, for the second time in two weeks, charged that state and county transportation officials had deliberately “skewed” statistics to exaggerate the effectiveness of the car-pool lanes.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Ralph B. Clark, a commission member, bristled at such remarks and, in a sarcastic, satirical gesture called upon California Highway Patrol representatives to explain how they could possibly provide the panel with allegedly “nefarious” and “inaccurate data.”

Asked Same Question

In a further bid to embarrass the drivers group, Clark asked the same question of Caltrans officials.

After the meeting, Joe Catron, founder of Drivers for Highway Safety, angrily charged that Clark had distorted his organization’s complaint.

“We have no beef with the CHP nor with the data from Caltrans,” Catron said. “Our beef is with the OCTC (Orange County Transportation Commission) staff for taking the data and misusing it to suit its own ends.”

Catron’s organization disputes the claim, made by the Transportation Commission, that the car-pool lanes have improved the freeway’s passenger-handling performance by 43% during peak rush hours, with fewer accidents.

Catron and other members of Drivers for Highway Safety argue that the statistics are misleading because they are based on a traffic study made while construction was in progress. The group contends that the work hampered traffic, providing an abnormal basis for comparison.

Seek More Data

Transportation Commission officials have responded that the project extension approved Monday will enable them to gather additional data that will clear up any doubts about whether the car-pool lanes are effective.

Sharon Greene, the Transportation Commission’s project analyst for the express lane experiment, acknowledged late Monday that a report showing increased numbers of car pools using the freeway since the experiment began did not take into account three days during which there were fewer car pools.

Greene said the data from those dates wasn’t available at the time she prepared her reports.

She also acknowledged that some of the claims that the express lanes are successful are based on traffic comparisons with only a single date. And that, her critics say, isn’t statistically valid.

Again, Greene said it was the only data available.

Bill Ward, a member of Drivers for Highway Safety and an engineering consultant, said he used a computer to analyze Greene’s figures. He concluded: “There’s no way to legitimately claim that the lanes are working better than if they were opened up to mixed flow traffic. . . . The occupancy rate per vehicle for the whole freeway has not changed in any statistically meaningful way.”

Ward and his group argue that the express lanes are unsafe because they put high-speed traffic adjacent to slower traffic that engages in sudden lane changes.

Greene said: “I think their (Drivers for Highway Safety) data is even more biased than they claim ours is.”

Ward said the only way to know who’s right is to leave the express lanes open to all traffic for three months and then compare the data from that experiment with statistics from a similar trial period for the car-pool lanes.

However, Caltrans has strongly opposed such action, arguing that it would be too confusing to drivers and that a year is barely sufficient for collecting information on which to base future decisions, let alone three months.

On another front, commission officials heard Irvine Co. transportation director John Boslet announce that the Newport Beach-based firm will start an experimental mini-bus service for people who work in the stores and offices at Newport Center. The new service, scheduled to begin April 28, will use the new car-pool lanes to operate between park-and-ride lots in Anaheim and Newport Center during peak morning and late afternoon traffic hours. Boslet said the company plans to charge passengers $1 each way and to underwrite the first-year cost of about $200,000.

The car-pool lanes extend about 11 miles northbound and southbound between the San Diego Freeway and the Riverside Freeway.