Study to Consider Widening Use of Car-Pool Lanes : Traffic: The idea would be to entice commuters to drive the freeways before and after peak hours, when the high-occupancy lanes would be open to all.

SANTA ANA —  Orange County’s car-pool lanes, long a point of controversy among beleaguered commuters, might be opened to all cars during non-peak hours if a study commissioned Monday recommends pursuing the idea.

The study, to cost $10,000, was ordered Monday by the Orange County Transportation Commission. Chuck Fuhs, a nationally recognized expert in high-occupancy vehicle lane issues, will perform the study, which will look at how similar lanes across the country are managed. Fuhs is expected to finish his work in November and present the report to the OCTC before the end of the year.

“What we’re trying to see is whether we can encourage single-occupant vehicles to use the highways in off-peak hours,” said Dana Reed, the commission’s chairman. Reed added that officials want to know if opening the lanes after rush hour might encourage drivers to avoid the freeway until then.

Currently, Orange County’s car-pool lanes bar all vehicles with fewer than two occupants 24 hours a day.

Changing that restriction could have a spillover effect on other counties and is not likely to be made in the near future, officials said. But the study could provide ammunition to one side or the other in the longstanding debate over high-occupancy lanes, which exist on the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways.

Proponents of the lanes argue that they encourage car-pooling, aiding efforts to curb traffic and air pollution. Opponents, however, view them as an unnecessary obstacle to commuting and argue that they worsen traffic flow rather than improve it.

Caught between those vocal constituencies, some officials have searched for a middle ground, so far without success. County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, who proposed the study, said Monday that he hoped that it could help “nullify some of the differences that we have in the community.”

California Highway Patrol officials, who have previously expressed their support for 24-hour car-pool lanes, eyed the study’s intentions skeptically.

“People right now are just getting used to the fact that you can’t go in those lanes unless you have two people in the car,” CHP Officer Angel Johnson said. “It would be much more confusing if there were certain hours when you could, and others when you couldn’t.”

Meanwhile, at Drivers for Highway Safety, an organization vehemently opposed to the car-pool lanes, co-chairman Bill Ward greeted news of the study with cautious optimism.

“It’s better for those lanes to be open than for them to be closed,” Ward said. “We’d like to see them opened all day long, but most of the day is better than none at all.”

Even if the study were to recommend ending the 24-hour-a-day restricted access, the county probably could not implement it without the agreement of governments in neighboring counties and cities, officials said. Otherwise, they noted, open lanes in one county could funnel directly into restricted ones as they passed over local borders. Drivers would be forced to switch lanes to avoid breaking laws in neighboring counties, adding to confusion and possibly increasing accidents.

“We fit into a regional context,” said Tom Fortune, public affairs director for the Transportation Commission. “Whatever we do is probably going to need to be part of a regional policy.”

While Orange County debates the future of its car-pool lanes, officials released a report Monday indicating that enforcement of the lane regulations has dramatically improved in recent months.

Added patrols and new signs on the San Diego and Costa Mesa freeways have led to a sharp reduction in the number of motorists violating car-pool lane restrictions on those highways, according to the report, prepared by the California Department of Transportation for the OCTC.

The report found that the number of single-occupant cars illegally using the high-occupany lanes has dropped by 50% on the southbound San Diego Freeway since May 1, when additional Highway Patrol officers were added to the route. Northbound violations during the same period have dropped from 6% of the cars using the lane to less than 2%.

In addition to the increased number of CHP officers monitoring the San Diego Freeway, warning signs on the Costa Mesa Freeway also seem to have cut down on the number of violations.

Signs notifying drivers that they can be fined $246 for a first offense were posted on April 25 in several places along the Costa Mesa Freeway. Since then, the violation rate has dropped by more than 50%, according to the Caltrans numbers.

Opponent Ward, however, said that passenger counts are difficult to verify, as they require surveyors to gauge the number of people in a car as it crosses beneath an overpass, often at high speeds.

Ward also questioned the relevance of the numbers, noting that violations drop off markedly after rush hours, since the highway becomes less congested and motorists have less incentive to cheat.