Fast Living All Part of L.A.'s Freeway Culture

By RICHARD SIMON

Feb. 26, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The driver was in Los Angeles traffic court on a recent morning fighting a ticket for traveling 75 m.p.h. on the Harbor Freeway.

“How fast do you think you were going?” asked Municipal Court Commissioner Allan Lasher.

“Not 75,” the driver insisted. “I could have been going 60-something.”

“Guilty!” declared Lasher, reminding the driver that the speed limit on urban freeways is 55 m.p.h.

That may be the law, but when it comes to California’s 55 m.p.h. speed limit, it appears that anarchy rules.

“Average speeds are creeping up,” acknowledged CHP Commissioner Maury Hannigan. A Caltrans survey shows that more than 60% of vehicles exceeded the 55 m.p.h. limit in 1992 and nearly 15% exceeded 65 m.p.h. A 1992 state poll of drivers found that 85% speed.

“We’re behaving like cockroaches,” said Harold Gerard, a UCLA professor of psychology, citing studies that show that one roach will run faster if another roach is present. “We’re responding to everyone else.”

“I’m always late for appointments,” said Stanley Hart, an Altadena engineer who has written about auto dependency. “That’s the excuse I give myself. But the reality is I’m trying to beat out the next guy.”

Citing the overwhelming disobedience of the speed law, a drivers’ group is seeking to repeal the 55-m.p.h. limit. An effort is expected to be made in the new Republican-controlled Congress to give states the authority to set their own speed limits.

“The flow of traffic is the safest speed a motorist can travel,” said Alex Carroll, California coordinator of the National Motorists Assn. and author of a book on how to fight traffic tickets. “The average speed on the highways in California is somewhere between 65 and 70 m.p.h. . . . If I tried to drive I-5 at 55 m.p.h., I would create a serious traffic hazard because everybody is going to be trying to get around me.”

CHP officers say they are enforcing the 55-m.p.h. limit, but there is only so much they can do with 800 officers at any one time to patrol 100,000 miles of state highways.

“Anybody over 55 m.p.h. is live bait,” said CHP Sgt. Ernie Garcia.

Many motorists regard speeding as a California birthright. The day the Century Freeway opened in 1993, the CHP ticketed a motorist for driving 100 m.p.h. On a notoriously high-speed stretch of the Foothill Freeway “I’ve gone 70 m.p.h.,” admitted a Caltrans worker who requested anonymity, “and traffic is blowing by me.”

Those freeways did not even make the top 10 Southern California freeways for speeding tickets. No. 1 was the wide-open stretch of the San Diego Freeway from Camp Pendleton through Oceanside. Tops in Los Angeles County was a section of the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Gordon Smith, an Apple Valley resident who commutes 94 miles to his job as a police officer in Downtown Los Angeles, drives a stretch of I-15 where the speed limit is 65 m.p.h.

“If I’m doing 65 m.p.h., I’m traveling with the flow of the trucks, and everybody is passing us,” Smith said. “We get fog. We get snow. But they don’t slow down until there is a bad accident.”

“It’s really not out of control,” insists Arthur Anderson, a CHP veteran who heads the state office of traffic safety.

A 1992 state survey of 1,026 motorists classified Californians in three categories:

There are the speed demons who habitually exceed the posted speed limit and have no qualms about it. They account for about 11% of all drivers, and nearly two-thirds are men.

At the other end of the spectrum are the super-cautious, accounting for 15% of drivers, who religiously obey traffic rules. About two-thirds of them are women.

In between were “sometimes speeders,” representing 74% of drivers.

Long Beach Municipal Court Commissioner Jeffery Castner said the excuses he has heard for speeding range from medical emergencies to a driver who stepped on the gas to get away from a motorist who was menacing her. Some judges report motorists have brought their speedometers to court, claiming they are defective--even though there is no way to verify that contention in the courtroom.

Castner cited the case of a “woman who had a sneezing fit” and, as a result, stepped hard on the gas pedal. “I suspended her sentence,” Castner said with a laugh.

“Some drivers, especially drivers who are not particularly astute to hard-core California freeway driving, can be intimidated into speeding,” he said. In the state survey, 30% of drivers said they were forced to speed by tailgaters.

UCLA psychology professor Gerard, who is also a psychotherapist, said that speeding is also the result of competitiveness.

“It’s a challenge when someone passes you to try to do the same,” he said. “A good deal of speeding has to do with mania, a state of mind in which people are trying to get away from depression.”

“I think we’re obsessed with the need for status,” Hart said. “Speeding is one way of gaining status.”

Others say that speeding is also the product of decades of advertisements and movies promoting fast cars; in one, a sports car races past a jet airplane.

But many drivers say they speed simply because they are in a rush to get from here to there.

The state survey also found that many drivers believe that law enforcement officers do not consistently enforce the speed laws on freeways and surface streets.

A female owner of a black Saab 9000 turbo said that she frequently travels Los Angeles freeways at 80 m.p.h. when traffic is light. Asked why she speeds, she said it was akin to the reason for climbing Mt. Everest. “The road is there,” she said. “It’s not the 1940s anymore. We have magnificently built vehicles. We have magnificently built roads. And if there is no one on the road. . . . It seems almost illogical to stick to the 55.”

She said that she feels confident in her ability to control the car and respond to circumstances. “Ask a Highway Patrol officer and they speed when they drive their personal cars because they know how to handle their cars at high speeds,” she said.

“I’ve seen people fly by me, too,” said CHP Commissioner Hannigan, who, in his unmarked car, pulled over a speeder who passed him at 95 m.p.h.

Speeding has been a problem since the arrival of cars--the speed limit in Los Angeles at the turn of the century was 8 m.p.h.

In the 1930s, local officials proposed requiring speed law violators to display bright red triangles on their license plates--badges of recklessness.

During World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked motorists to slow down to conserve tires, Gov. Culbert Olson ordered the CHP to stop motorists traveling faster than 40 m.p.h. and warn them that “they are violating their patriotic duty by wantonly wasting precious rubber.”

In the early 1950s, speeders barreling down the newly opened freeways were routinely sentenced to several days in jail. The speeding problem became so bad that Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker announced that motor officers would cruise the Hollywood Freeway at 55 m.p.h., and any motorist who passed them would be ticketed. In 1956, Los Angeles posted signs on streets reading, “Speed Kills--Slow Down and Live.”

In the early 1970s, federal officials came up with the novel idea of requiring devices in cars that would restrict top speed to 95 m.p.h. and activate buzzers with flashing lights when the vehicles reached 85 m.p.h.

The 55 m.p.h. limit went into effect in 1974, during the energy crisis. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the “55” had to be highlighted on speedometers. That requirement was later repealed.

In 1987, in response to Prohibition-like claims that the 55 m.p.h. limit has made the United States a nation of lawbreakers and assertions that deaths and injuries would not increase because people were already traveling at high speeds, Congress allowed states to increase speed limits to 65 m.p.h. in remote areas.

Years ago, when the speed limit was a uniform 65 m.p.h. on most freeways throughout California, drivers were generally allowed to soar to 70 m.p.h. in the far-left lane, recalled longtime CHP officers. That’s where the term fast lane came from. But there is no such thing as the fast lane anymore; they’re all fast lanes.

There is a method to most people’s speeding madness.

“Although people often opt to travel somewhat faster than the posted limit, they do not completely ignore it, but choose a speed they perceive as unlikely to result in a ticket,” according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “The more important speed-related safety issue on freeways involves the proportion of vehicles traveling at very high speeds, not the proportion violating the speed limit.”

Just how fast can you go before being pulled over?

‘Any time you’re going over 55 m.p.h., you’re putting yourself in jeopardy,” said CHP Officer Scott Howlett.

But he offered this advice: “You don’t want to be the one who stands out as being the fastest” or weaving in and out of traffic.

CHP Commissioner Hannigan said: “The officer is going to focus on those people he or she believes are the highest risk.” The CHP has guidelines for pulling over speeders but, Hannigan said, “I’m not going to tell them to you.”

Most of the speeders brought before Los Angeles Municipal Court Commissioner Lasher were traveling from 65 m.p.h. to 115 m.p.h., he said.

“The Highway Patrol will not publicly say there is any grace, and that’s probably for good cause,” said Lasher, who presides over traffic court. “Assuming they were to say, ‘We don’t cite anybody under 65,’ they have just raised the speed limit to 65.”

Whether a motorist gets a speeding ticket is often simply “luck of the draw,” several traffic judges said.

“I don’t think there are many officers who are intentionally overlooking an 80 m.p.h. driver to cite a 65 m.p.h. driver,” Lasher said. “On the other hand, assuming the officer is cruising along . . . and sees somebody going 66 m.p.h., and says, ‘Well, there’s nobody else around. I might as well stop this guy.’ ”

Like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, the state office of traffic safety has waged a campaign to slow down California drivers, offering these reasons:

* Nearly one-fourth of injury collisions--and about 11% of fatal collisions--are caused by motorists traveling at unsafe speeds. The probability of a fatality or serious injury doubles with every 10 m.p.h. driven over 50 m.p.h.

* Pollution emissions, on average, more than double when speeds increase from 55 m.p.h. to 65 m.p.h. There is an average loss of 2% in fuel economy for every mile over 55 m.p.h.

* Only three minutes will be gained on the average 20-minute trip if the driver goes steadily at 55 m.p.h. instead of 65 m.p.h.

And if those aren’t good enough reasons, consider this: Speeding violations bring with them higher insurance rates and stiff fines, ranging from $82 for traveling 11 m.p.h. to 15 m.p.h. over the limit to more than $330 for traveling more than 100 m.p.h. No one gets sent to the pokey anymore for just speeding.

On a recent day in Downtown traffic court, a number of speeders unable to pay the fines were given the option of performing one hour of community service for every $5 fine.

The social costs are higher, though, according to traffic experts.

“A lot of the hard-won gains in air bags, in belt laws, in drunk driving enforcement, are being given up to high speeds,” said Chuck Hurley, senior vice president of communications for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. He said elected officials have sent the public a mixed message: “Drink and drive and you’re a social disgrace, but it’s perfectly OK to speed.”

Hannigan said that his officers have reduced the death rate considerably by enforcing the drunk driving and seat belt laws.

CHP officers say that when speeding gets out of hand, they conduct “round robins,” where a cruiser gets in front of traffic and slowly weaves back and forth. Or the CHP saturates problem spots with extra cruisers. Just the presence of a CHP officer slows down traffic--a phenomenon the troops call “black and white fever.”

“I’m not one who is convinced that writing tickets for the purpose of writing tickets is going to solve the problem,” Hannigan said. “We’ve got to bring about voluntary compliance.”

The bottom line may be that speeding has become a Gordian Knot in a culture where the pace of life has accelerated exponentially in recent years.

It is a fact not lost on Madison Avenue.

“Speed sells,” Hurley said. “Speed is a metaphor for freedom.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Speed Alleys

These were the Top 10 spots for speeding tickets in Los Angeles County from January through June, 1994.

Rank: 1.

Number of tickets: 1,865

Locations: Antelope Valley Fwy., Ward Road to Avenue M

Rank: 2.

Number of tickets: 1,774

Locations: Foothill Fwy., Mountain Avenue/Seco Street in Pasadena to Rosemead Boulevard