Agency Offers Plan to Change Driving Habits : Commute: Sandag would rely on voluntary cooperation from business and needs the approval of the county’s 18 city councils and the county Board of Supervisors.

Trying to forestall an even stricter plan from the region’s smog district, a planning agency is pushing its own program to change San Diego County’s commuting habits.

After 15 years of voluntary efforts to cut down on the morning-evening commuter crunch have showed little result, the San Diego Assn. of Governments wants to enlist employers to offer staggered work hours, car-pool incentives and bus subsidies.

That plan is now going the rounds of the chicken-salad circuit to gain support from local governments and businessmen.

A bigger question, however, is whether the plan will gain the support of the county’s Air Pollution Control District, which has a different set of priorities from Sandag. The air district is concerned about meeting state and federal air quality standards; Sandag’s plan attempts only to keep rush-hour commuter traffic from getting worse.

John Duve, administrator of the Sandag Traffic Management Plan, hopes to have it in operation by next January. If it works as predicted, the plan will stem congestion on the county’s freeways, so that in the year 2000 it will be about the level it is today.

Rich Sommerville, the air district’s executive director, calls the Sandag plan “a great start” at cutting freeway congestion, but questions if the plan will produce the results required to meet tough state and federal air quality standards in the coming decade.

“I think that it is a plan that is likely to achieve the objectives for which it was intended,” Sommerville conceded, “but unlikely to effect the substantial reductions in vehicle miles traveled which federal and state air quality agencies are requiring in the next decade.”

Sandag has the head start on a traffic management plan; the air district is just gearing up now to tackle the problem, Sommerville said. But the air district has the authority to institute a program for cutting down on smog and to levy fines; Sandag is a planning body that must rely on cooperation.

Duve said the Sandag plan, the product of 18 months of study sparked by North County residents’ efforts to solve a perennial traffic problem along California 78, will do the job if city officials, employers and college leaders agree to enforce it.

The plan needs the approval of the county’s 18 city councils and the county Board of Supervisors to have any clout. But, he stresses, the agency’s plans are designed to prove that old saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

“We are going around the county, holding meetings to explain the plan and getting feedback from employers. Then we will take it before the cities,” Duve explained. “We need acceptance of the plan, and this is the way we are going about it.”

The Sandag plan would require employers to submit a companywide program aimed primarily at taking cars off the freeways during rush hours. There would be rewards, such as bus fare subsidies and preferred car-pool parking, for workers who join. Those who stick to their single cars might face penalties, such as parking fees.

Other controls would stagger work shifts and create more four-day work weeks, which would remove some drivers from rush-hour commuting but would not aid in reducing air pollution from their automobiles.

Employers with 50 or more workers would be required to submit annual plans to Sandag in 1991; smaller companies would follow over the next two years. Any firm that failed to meet its deadline for submitting a traffic management plan could be fined $100 per employee per month until the plan is turned in.

But there the penalties stop. If a firm fails to put its plan into effect, or the plan doesn’t work for two years, then the company must submit a more comprehensive plan. But it faces no penalties.

Duve said that penalties are likely to be added for firms who do nothing to implement their traffic plans.

That’s one rub that county air-district officials see in the home-grown plan, which was devised by a 40-member business/politician group.

Sommerville says the air district will go before the County Board of Supervisors this spring to outline its criteria for air quality improvement, including traffic regulation. The agency plans to institute a “revised air quality strategy” in June, 1991.

Sommerville pointed out that the program in effect in the six-county Southern California Air Quality Management District also is locally run by employers, who try to persuade their workers to car-pool, van-pool, bicycle, jog, work out of their homes or take a bus to work. The companies are required to show results, but the methods they use are up to them.

Perhaps more significant, according to a spokeswoman for the Southern California air district, is that measures such as those proposed by Sandag--bus pass subsidies or parking fees--have proven ineffective in getting workers out of their cars.

Some companies in that area have had to lure employees with luxury vans with air-conditioned, extra-plush seating. Others offered on-site child care and gourmet cafeterias to counter their employees’ claims that they needed their cars for those services.

The Southern California air district has the power to levy $25,000-a-day fines on companies that fail to submit traffic reduction plans on schedule. But the fines are rarely handed out, the spokeswoman said, because “cooperation works for everyone’s best interests.”

Still, the May Co. was fined $150,000, and there were at least two $25,000 fines.

But Duve said he still favors his approach, in which the people who will be involved are the ones who tailor the plan to the realities of San Diego County, where 90% of the employers have 25 or fewer employees.

“This (Sandag) program should work, if we are given the chance,” Duve said. “Otherwise, we have all wasted a lot of time.”

Lee Thibadeau, San Marcos mayor and one of the creators of the Sandag plan, said it is designed to get cars, especially cars with only the driver aboard, off the freeways during commuting hours. San Marcos is the only city in the county which has adopted a traffic management plan designed to smooth out peak-hour traffic with the help of employers, college officials and delivery firms.

Although the program is voluntary, 80% of the city’s employers participate, he said.

Thibadeau concedes that he is disappointed that neighboring cities--Vista, Carlsbad, Oceanside and Escondido--have not followed suit and started some traffic management programs that will help San Marcos put a dent in the morning-evening traffic crunch that develops each weekday on California 78, which runs through the five North County cities and is the only east-west auto route in the area.

The San Marcos mayor said the horrendous traffic congestion on California 78 united the five cities in trying to solve the problem locally by rescheduling work hours, encouraging bus travel by employees and other stratagems to even out the traffic flow along the 17-mile-long freeway.

“They were very enthusiastic,” he said of the other cities’ officials, “but they didn’t follow through. San Marcos can’t do it alone.”