Commuters Make the Adjustment

Gird yourself, the experts warned. Read the writing on the seismo-cam. The mighty freeways have been hobbled. Prepare for the Commute From Hell.

But like most disasters in Southern California, Day 1 of the traffic apocalypse looked more sweeping on TV than it was in the real life of this resilient region. There was bedlam, yes, but it was of a patchy sort, punctuating long, sunny spans of open road.

Part of this was a function of the continuing state of emergency: Spooked by the aerial photos of collapsed freeways and buckled roads, thousands of Angelenos spent Tuesday’s rush hours hunkered down at home. Schools canceled classes. Some government offices were closed. News announcers urged motorists to stay off the roads.

But part, too, was what traffic engineers hope will be a permanent cleaning up of L.A.’s commuting act. Those who had to punch in planned their trips. Some hopped a train, taking advantage of the extra rail cars Metrolink added. Others dusted off map books, plotting surface-street detours into neighborhoods they had whizzed past for years.

A very few even--dare we say it?--car-pooled, although they remained a minority. (The Angelenos who have opened home, heart and wallet to neighbors in need mostly draw the line when it comes to sharing their commute.)

There were some rough roads, especially in the Antelope Valley, where a snapped Interstate 14 left an entire suburb marooned.

But throughout, adversity seemed tempered with good-natured esprit de corps.

On the fractured west end of the Santa Monica Freeway, the busiest stretch of the busiest freeway in the United States, a steady stream of morning traffic detoured politely onto surface streets.

Never mind that half-hour commutes were taking an hour or more. The view was this: Car after car after car patiently edging ahead, advancing in fits and starts past lolling cables and slumped roadbed, bulldozers and hard hats.

“I think it’s going to be frustrating at first, but we’ll settle in and it’ll become another part of the routine,” said lawyer Michael Soloff as he and his wife threaded their black Mitsubishi Montero down jampacked Pico Boulevard as they made their way from Santa Monica to Downtown.

It was unclear, however, how easily even Soloff would settle in. His trip clocked in at 59 minutes--a challenge for the long haul--and halfway to their destination, his attorney wife, Sue Himmelrich, was heard to sigh, “This is going to be a year of our lives.”

Those who got an early start discovered they had outfoxed themselves. Ken Lipp and Everett McDaniel hit the road at the mind-numbing hour of 3:40 a.m. Sleepy and squinting, they rattled from the Antelope Valley toward Long Beach in Lipp’s 1971 Datsun with the broken heater, raspy throttle and fake mohair seats.

It took them about an hour to wend their way past the spot where their local freeway had been reduced to what looked from the air like a big, gray dotted line. But from there on, it was clear sailing on Interstate 5.

“Hey!” cried McDaniel.

“Open highway!” said Lipp.

There wasn’t a soul in sight. They made it to their offices at McDonnell Douglas with almost an hour to spare.

Still, they weren’t celebrating. At best, the trip from the Antelope Valley soaks up nearly four hours of each working day. At worst--well, at worst, it was something Lipp didn’t want to have to think about.

“I already talked to my wife last night and said if this commute doesn’t work out, if it’s too much stress, I might have to stay in Long Beach,” he said.

Indeed, Lipp’s part of town was perhaps the worst case in Tuesday’s worst-case scenario. Although pre-dawn commuters such as Lipp had an easy time, those who hit the road after rush hour were impossibly snarled.

In Santa Clarita, traffic snaked for several miles along Sierra Highway, a drive that might be scenic most days but was made almost unbearable by traffic, summer-like weather and light Santa Ana winds. At one point, eight lanes of commuters had been funneled into single file. Cars crept by at one-tenth the posted speed limit of 50 m.p.h.

“This isn’t stop-and-go traffic,” marveled KNX-AM traffic reporter Jill Angel. “This is stop-and-stop!”

At the intersection of Sierra Highway and San Fernando Road, sheriff’s deputies directed four long lines of cars and trucks this way and that. And one way was not much better than another.

Akram Dabbagh, heading from Valencia to Granada Hills in the hope of getting a friend to repair two television sets, made the 40-minute drive from his home only to confront the crush of cars. The spectacle undid him. At the intersection, he turned back. “Maybe I should choose another day,” he said.

Across the street, Liz Suter, bound for Maui, was beginning to wonder if she’d make it to the plane. Waiting in a Carl’s Jr. parking lot for an express shuttle to Los Angeles International Airport, she was told not only that she had missed her van but that when the next one finally showed up, she might be facing a six-hour ride.

Here too, though, there were bright spots--or at the very least, there was Barbara Argento, beckoning motorists to her makeshift coffee stand. Sensing a new niche in the local economy, Argento and her 4-year-old daughter Samantha had armed themselves with store-bought muffins and a Mr. Coffee-style carafe, and had set up shop on a card table near the Antelope Valley Freeway overpass. She had always wanted a cafe, she said, but there had never been enough traffic. “This is like a godsend,” she smiled, looking radiantly at the string of cars.

But the jam was the exception.

Elsewhere in the region, even on many Westside surface streets, traffic was holiday light. On the Pomona Freeway, rush-hour traffic shot by at 70 m.p.h.--and that was in the slower lanes. At the Security Pacific Plaza, bankers from as far away as Tustin and as nearby as Hancock Park described their drive in as “a piece of cake.”

It was “a breeze,” said a lawyer who took the Pasadena Freeway. A San Bernardino commuter called it “the smoothest trip I’ve ever had to Downtown.”

“I was very surprised,” allowed contractor John Goeglien, who shot 75 miles down the Ventura Freeway from Ojai to West L.A. in just about an hour.

But, he added, “this usually happens right after a disaster. It’ll probably be back to normal in a few days--jerks behind the wheel.”