Caltrans to Track Down Drivers for Rail Survey : Transit: License plates of cars on I-10 will be recorded so state can ask motorists where they were going. Data will be destroyed at end of study.

Caltrans wants to know where drivers are headed on Interstate 10 in Riverside County, so it plans to photograph the license plates of passing cars, get motorists’ addresses from the Department of Motor Vehicles and drop them a note.

The survey, to be conducted between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Nov. 8 and 10, is designed to find out whether state-subsidized intercity trains might be able to ease some traffic coming into San Bernardino and Los Angeles from Palm Springs, Indio and points east.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that traffic is increasing in the I-10 corridor,” said Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago. “But where are all those people going? If they are all going to one place, rail can make some sense.”

The first challenge, he said, is to find out who is on the road. To do that, Caltrans will use a video camera mounted on the Beaumont Avenue overpass in Beaumont, about 22 miles east of Riverside, to record the license plates of cars whizzing by.

Caltrans will match the license numbers to a DMV master registration list to obtain the mailing addresses of the cars’ owners. Each owner will be mailed a survey, which they can fill out or ignore, Drago said.

“It’s a unique opportunity to help tell the bureaucracy how to spend our money,” he said.

State transportation officials realize that California drivers value their privacy--a lesson learned this year when similar surveys in Northern California led dozens of angry and curious drivers to light up the switchboard at Caltrans headquarters.

“The problem was that everyone got these surveys in the mail sight unseen, asking them why they were on the freeway,” Drago said. “Only a couple of people got really hot and bothered, but we still got more than 100 calls from people saying: ‘What is this (information) for?’ ”

To try to avoid such calls, Caltrans announced this survey in advance and stressed that only an owner’s name and address will be sought from the DMV. All records, including names and addresses, will be destroyed once the study is completed.

The study was prompted by the passage of Proposition 116, a $2.9-billion rail transit bond measure, in 1990. That initiative called for studies of certain heavily traveled highways to see if congestion could be relieved with passenger train service instead of highway expansion. “Caltrans has always been good at telling you how many people go by a certain point on a highway, but what we could never say was where they were going,” Drago said. “Knowing where someone is going is not so important with a highway. But it’s very important with rail because it takes a tremendous capital investment to build a line, so you’d better be sure someone will use it.”