PE.com - Commuting Blog
Phil Pitchford
Phil has been a reporter at The Press-Enterprise since 1990 and has covered transportation since mid-2005. He writes about all the ways people get around, from solo driving to the far reaches of Southern California to how local freeway improvements affect your drive across town. Feel free to contact him at (951) 368-9475 or ppitchford@PE.com
August 20, 2007
Metrolink safety improvements coming -- to LA County
Metrolink kicked off its new "sealed corridor" program today. It's an effort to increase safety at railroad crossings by improving 63 crossings across 65 miles of track. The move comes about two years after a train/SUV collision caused an accident that killed 11 people.
Options include quandrant gates, which basically double the number of gates at a crossing to discourage people from cutting across the tracks, longer gate arms, locked gates, fences and other improvements. All the measures are designed to further discourage people who flaunt the law and try to cross the tracks even when they are not supposed to.
The program, however, is starting on the Ventura County and Antelope Valley lines of Metrolink, neither of which comes within 50 miles of the Inland area. Part of the problem is money -- it is a $100 million program for which Metrolink has secured about $20 million. Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell said such improvements eventually will be made in the Inland area, most probably in San Bernardino County first, since Metrolink does not own the tracks its trains use in Riverside County.
Posted by Phil Pitchford at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
August 17, 2007
Fun with ramp meters
The ramp meter you encounter when you try to get on the freeway during busy traffic periods typically gives you two choices that we're all able to negotiate pretty easily.
Green means go.
Red means stop and wait for green.
But what about when the ramp meter light is yellow? I raise this because one of my colleagues, environmental reporter/blogger Jennifer Bowles, ran into this situation this morning while getting on the 91 freeway at Madison Street. Maybe this is a common thing witnessed daily by commuters who spend a lot of time on the freeway, but it was a new one on me.
The good folks at Caltrans say the yellow light situation typically results when the ramp meter is, well, ramping up. The meters activate through a combination of timing and traffic flow, meaning they are set to come on during the typical commute hours and may come on at other times if traffic counts on the freeway itself are unusually high.
The meters often start on yellow for a short period of time before they are ready to begin the work of moderating the pace at which a lot of vehicles enter freeway traffic. Once the warm-up period is complete, the ramp meter will then start cycling through with red/green/red.
Perhaps now is a good time to remind everyone that a yellow light typically requires the driver to slow down and prepare to stop. Once you have done that, if the ramp light remains on yellow, proceed with caution onto the freeway, since the light has not changed to red. Of course, once the warm-up period is over and the red/green cycle kicks in, follow it.
Posted by Phil Pitchford at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
August 15, 2007
Who wouldn't want to go to the DMV?
Apparently more than 150,000 Inland residents in the first six months of the year, according to the latest stats dealing with online vehicle registration. The DMV says a record number of people across the state registered their vehicles online during the first half of the year instead of waiting in line at their local DMV office. It's definitely hard to argue with the reasoning there.
The numbers are 2.36 million vehicles, or roughly 23.8 percent more than a year ago, for the state. Of that, 464,647 vehicles were registered in July alone. The IE figures are 153,346, or 31.6 percent more than the same period last year. That percentage increase in the Inland area was the second-largest in the state, right after the Central Valley with 32.2 percent.
For a listing of all the online ways you can avoid going to the DMV, click here.
Posted by Phil Pitchford at 2:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
August 14, 2007
Toll lane cheating -- it's not just for Florida
Apparently there are plenty of people right here in Southern California who do all sorts of wacky things to avoid paying the toll on the 91 Express Lanes. After I blogged earlier about how scofflaws are avoiding payment in Florida, an alert reader tipped to this little nugget, which shows that the problem is pretty universal.
Posted by Phil Pitchford at 4:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
August 13, 2007
A firsthand look at carpool lanes in NorCal
Just back from vacation, which typically is not worth blogging. But part of the trip included a couple of days in the Sacramento area, where carpool lanes operate in a much different manner than here in SoCal. And there is an effort to equalize the two sets of rules in such a way that would give us more flexibility.
In a nutshell, they have what we are trying to get: the ability to enter and exit the carpool lane at any time, provided you have enough people in your car to qualify as a carpool. Instead of the double-yellow line with openings where you exit, the carpool lane has the same markings as any other lane. Transportation types like to call this "continuous ingress and egress." I call it "refreshingly simple."
NorCal carpool lanes also allow solo drivers to use the lanes during off-peak hours, another plum we can't quite seem to get, despite the efforts of local transportation officials and legislators. As noted in The P-E last week, just experimenting with the idea is a major hassle.
Bottom line, I used these lanes during off-peak hours and did not observe a bunch of solo drivers clogging things up. I also used them, with the adequate number of people in the vehicle to qualify as a carpool, during the peak periods and did not have a problem with people cutting in and out of the lanes in an unsafe manner.
Maybe I caught Sacramento traffic on a couple of good days. Maybe our traffic levels down here are high enough that our experience would be different. But it definitely was a nice change not having to scramble to get out of the carpool lane at precisely the right time in order to exit the freeway and not have to double back.
Posted by Phil Pitchford at 9:49 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)