PE.com - Commuting Blog

With kids heading back to school -- hurray! -- it's a good time to remember a couple of important traffic laws -- stopping when a school bus is picking up or dropping off kids, and the correct way to do that.

The first one is easily understandable. About 93 percent of drivers polled by GMAC Insurance were able to correctly identify that, when approaching a stopped school bus with flashing red lights, you have to stop. But 47 percent of those polled underestimated the amount of distance you should keep between your vehicle and the school bus. For the record, it's at least 20 feet, which is usually about a car length and a half.

Nationwide, about 25 million students are headed back to school, and about 500,000 buses will be on the road. Statistics show that most school bus accidents occur when students are getting on or off the bus, and twice as many children are killed this way versus an actual bus accident. Keeping an adequate distance each time can really help.

Posted by Phil Pitchford at 9:55 AM, August 27
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The haggling involved with buying a car remains an unpleasant experience for many women, according to a survey by CarMax, the largest single seller of used vehicles in the U.S. The poll, conducted on the company's website, surveyed more than 12,000 women and found that only about 7 percent thought they had received a reasonable finance rate. Only about 13 percent of respondents felt they received fair value for their trade-in and the same percentage thought their needs were being respected. CarMax recommends such steps as using the Internet to research the vehicle you want, bringing a pre-approval letter from a lender and finding a salesperson via a referral from a friend or relative.

Posted by Phil Pitchford at 7:27 AM, August 22
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Many commuters have told me they feel the wheels of progress move too slowly when it comes to widening congested freeways. But, thankfully, those wheels do move.

The Orange County Transportation Authority, for example, is holding an open house today to brief commuters on plans to add an eastbound lane to Highway 91 between Highway 241 in the Yorba Linda area and Highway 71 in the Corona/Chino area.

The meeting is from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Green River Golf Club, 5215 Green River Road in Corona.

For those of you scoring at home, the project is nearly 7 miles long, with about four of those miles in Orange County and the rest in Riverside County. As this report states, the project will widen five bridges, build four sound walls and a bunch of retaining walls, plus add landscaping.

Don't buy the party favors just yet, however. Construction on the $80 million project is not expected to start until 2009, with completion slated for 2011. And, of course, the usual factors -- weather, cost of materials, etc. -- could play havoc with both the date and the cost estimate.

Posted by Phil Pitchford at 9:35 AM, August 21
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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, August 20
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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, August 17
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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, August 15
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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, August 14
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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, August 13
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