Monday, Jul. 20, 1987

Trapped Behind The Wheel

By Martha Smilgis

There are trends, all too easily discernible, in dinner conversations. The saga of domestic help is a persistent one -- pretty worked over by now. Real estate is an ongoing turnoff, but the new buzz is even more boring and more inescapable. It is traffic.

In a scene replayed thousands of times each evening in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and burgeoning suburbs nationwide, the last guests for a 7:30 dinner straggle in 40 minutes late, muttering their astonishment -- but not, significantly, their apologies -- that it took them 90 minutes to drive ten miles. Their woes inevitably inspire the other guests to a round of competitive traffic horror stories that continue well into the entree.

There is the one about the drivers who sneak into the lane reserved for car pools by planting inflated dummies in the passenger seats. And the pregnant woman who successfully argued in court that she and her fetus were entitled to use the car-pool lane because they were separate persons. Then there are the days that live in legend -- like Oct. 29, 1986, when a single midafternoon accident on the San Diego Freeway spread gridlock along connecting freeways and surface streets from downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, trapping tens of thousands of motorists for eight full hours. (Survivors of such mythic urban struggles brag about them like good ole boys at the VFW bar.)

There are reasons for the quickening national paralysis: more and more people live and work in locations that are not linked to adequate public transport, millions of women have entered the work force and are new rush-hour drivers, ingenious alternatives seem to get stymied by lack of imagination or money or both, and, above all, gas is cheap. In places where gas is still below a dollar, many drivers have reverted to old habits, and in some parts of the U.S. a two-occupant car is about as common as a bald eagle.

In California the state government estimates that each day 300,000 work hours are lost to traffic jams at a cost of $2 million. On the Capital Beltway near Washington, gridlock costs employers as much as $120 million a year in lost time. But the toll on the individual commuter, usually lone but hardly a ranger, is heavier still. Without hope of release, he sits in his little cell inhaling exhaust fumes and staring blankly at the zinc sky.

| Some drivers try to fight the sentence. Take Jeff Seibert, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Miami School of Medicine, who finds that his 25-minute ride to work, which includes the unpredictable Dolphin Expressway, can stretch into an hour and 15 minutes. "When the radio traffic announcer advises to stay clear of a certain area, I drive right to that point," he says, figuring that the warning has cleared the congestion by dispersing most commuters onto different routes. Others, like Kathi Douglas, a recent graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, undergo an attitude change. "I'm laid back and talkative, yet once I get on the road, I have no respect for rules and regulations," says Douglas. "You get to be really aggressive because you think it's the only way to get out of this madness."

Extreme frustration can lead to violence. Four freeway shootings have been reported in the Los Angeles area in the past eleven months. On the Santa Ana Freeway, a speed demon angered by a car that did not move from the fast lane pulled up alongside the offending vehicle and fatally shot a passenger in the front seat.

There are saner approaches to highway stasis. Ken Jenson, 28, a Los Angeles salesman, used to spend much of his hour-long commute singing with the radio. Last year he stopped the music and began studying to become a stockbroker. "I made tapes of the texts and took notes while I listened on the drive to and from work," explains Jenson, who is now a broker in the Westwood office of Merrill Lynch. "It's amazing that I didn't hit anyone." Using the rear-view mirror, many men shave with electric razors and women often apply their makeup. Some people even dress behind the wheel. Janice Conover, a Hampton Jitney Co. bus driver who regularly plies the Long Island Expressway (popularly known as the Long Island Parking Lot), has seen motorists so engrossed in the morning newspaper that they drift from one lane toward another, luckily at minimal speed.

Hungry drivers gobble breakfast, often an Egg McMuffin, from Styrofoam cartons and slurp coffee from no-slosh mugs. Others balance checkbooks, do crossword puzzles and dictate letters and grocery lists into pocket-size tape recorders. Hot summer weekends offer an opportunity for passengers to take partial charge of the car. Inching along to the approach to the George Washington Bridge between New Jersey and Manhattan, occupants of cars without air conditioning who face delays of more than an hour hold the doors open for a little circulation.

It is possible to transform an auto into a slow-rolling "home away from home." Larry Schreiner, a free-lance reporter for a Chicago radio station and several local TV stations, often lives and works in his Mercedes 560 SEL. "I have everything I need," says Schreiner, whose longest continuous stretch on wheels was 36 hours. His office supplies include five two-way radios, two cellular phones, one headset (so he can talk on radio shows while working on videotapes), two video cameras and three video recorders. That's not all. In the trunk Schreiner keeps batteries, lighting equipment, three still cameras, telephone books, road maps and a change of clothes.

For nest-building commuters, the place to go is Chicago's Warshawsky & Co., which bills itself as the largest auto parts and accessory store in the world. It offers in-dash televisions ($300), compact-disc adapters, orthopedic seat cushions, heated seats for winter, and computers with cruise control and estimated time of arrival (up to $149). Upscale drivers install $2,000 car phones (although in Los Angeles, where there are 65,000 subscribers, airwaves are jammed in rush hours). Ordinary folk can ape "techie" drivers by ordering an imitation antenna from Warshawsky for a mere $12.

Traffic is thick enough to defeat just about anything except perhaps the mating instinct. In fact, some have found that choked freeways can enhance the possibilities of finding a mate. Ruth Guillou, an enterprising Huntington Beach, Calif., widow, was idling along when she saw a "charming-looking man in a yellow Cadillac. I couldn't get him out of my mind. There should have been a way for me to make contact with him." Thus was born the Freeway Singles Club, a mail-forwarding service whose participants pay $35 for a numbered decal that identifies them as members. The group has a roster of 2,000 in Southern California and has expanded to 16 states.

According to Manhattan Psychiatrist T.B. Karasu, motorists can be divided into two categories: adaptives, those who accept things as they are and understand that they cannot be in control of all situations, and nonadaptives. The nonadaptives, says Karasu, "blow their horns and irritate everybody else as well as themselves. Noise is an external and excessive stimulus that increases rather than decreases tension. When you yell or are yelled at, your body releases more adrenaline, your blood vessels constrict, your pressure ! rises, and you get headaches. You are still wound up three or four hours later." Karasu points out that nonadaptive behavior, or the inability to cope with freeway stress, could lead to heart attacks or strokes for some. He advises motorists to relax by thinking they are passengers in an airplane with a captain running things. "Listen to music, daydream, focus on things you normally don't find time to think about," says Karasu. "Above all else, accept that you are where you are, and there is nothing that you can do about it."

Another solution is to change your address. Traffic jams have discouraged even the President and Nancy Reagan from returning to their old neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, Calif.: "We really can't go out that far because traffic in Los Angeles is now so bad," said the First Lady to U.P.I. "You'd be on the road all the time." If motorcades can't beat the crawl, then ordinary mortals had best sit back, turn up the stereo and wait patiently for the age of Hovercraft and rocket belts.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles, + with other bureaus