Rush-Hour Lane May Help Clear Way for Car Pools : Sepulveda Boulevard: City engineers hope the move will encourage ride-sharing and bus ridership between the Valley and the Westside.

In an effort to ease the commute home for San Fernando Valley motorists, a one-mile stretch of southbound Sepulveda Boulevard near Mulholland Drive will be restricted to northbound car pools and buses on weekday afternoons beginning next Thursday, Mayor Tom Bradley announced Wednesday.

The pilot program, the first of its kind in Los Angeles County, is aimed at inducing San Fernando Valley motorists to join car pools or ride buses.

That should reduce overall congestion through the Sepulveda Pass on both the freeway and the boulevard, said a Bradley aide.

“This is the choke point, and we’re hoping that this plan will shave 10 or 15 minutes off the trip through the Sepulveda Pass” for bus and car-pool users, said William Bicker, the mayor’s transportation deputy.

The reverse lane will “significantly reduce the traffic headaches for commuters who ride-share along this route,” Bradley said.

The inside southbound lane will be turned over to northbound vehicles by use of orange traffic cones set out at 3 p.m. each weekday and picked up four hours later, officials said.

The lane will be restricted from Mountaingate Drive to the northern end of the tunnel under Mulholland Drive.

Sepulveda Boulevard is two lanes each way from Sherman Oaks to West Los Angeles, except for the tunnel section, which is two lanes southbound and one lane northbound at all times.

The traffic pattern, in which the bulk of the traffic flows south in the morning and north in the evening, lends itself to reversing a lane during peak hours, city transportation engineers say.

Nonetheless, traffic experts expect “the first couple of days will be pretty rough” as motorists adjust to the lane switch, said Jim Sherman, who will oversee the project of the city Department of Transportation.

The program’s cost of $200,000 a year will be taken from the city’s share of money from the extra half-cent sales tax that county voters approved in November.

If the reverse lane is successful, a northbound lane will be converted to southbound use by car pools and buses from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Bicker said.

He said the traffic engineers have taken daily counts of car pools through the pass to determine if ride-sharing and bus ridership increases as a result of the reverse lane.

“We’d like to eventually extend it from the Valley to the Westside,” Bicker said.

Installing permanent reverse lanes along that nine-mile stretch, with special traffic lights directing motorists, would cost an estimated $18 million, city engineers report.