Road Scholars

It’s early.

Just a tick past 5:30 a.m. and Officer Dave Wigton of the California Highway Patrol is looking at the clock, waiting for the morning briefing to begin.

There is no fresh coffee steaming in a pot. No doughnuts in a box. Just a pile of day-old newspapers that Wigton flips through as another officer polishes her leather holster.

“What’s the latest on the weather?” someone asks from the small locker room at the CHP’s Moorpark station.

No one answers, but through the window, in the half-light before dawn, thick clouds can be seen gathering to the northwest.

Another storm is about to roll over Ventura County--just in time to sprinkle an element of chaos onto the patrol’s busiest time of day--the morning commute.

Each weekday more than 472,000 county residents climb into their cars for their drive to work. More than 97,000 of them will make their way to Los Angeles and points south via thoroughfares such as the Ventura Freeway.

Wigton will patrol the Ronald Reagan Freeway this morning and drive a continuous 10-mile loop from Madera Road in Simi Valley to the county line and back until his shift ends at 2:30 p.m.

He is but one of many for whom the commute is the office.

As Wigton waits to begin his patrol, dozens of others, including an airborne traffic reporter and a radio show personality, are already hard at work making sure the commute comes off as smoothly and comfortably as it possibly can.

It isn’t until about 6 a.m. that the briefing ends and Wigton--a tall, barrel-chested man with glacier-blue eyes in a round, boyish face--steps into his patrol car and pulls out onto the road.

“This is it,” he says from atop the onramp at Los Angeles Avenue. “This is what we’re here for.”

Below, a ribbon of traffic speeds east toward the Santa Susana Pass and the San Fernando Valley.

*

Even at this hour, traffic is heavy, but running smooth as drivers shift between lanes, jockeying for position in their daily race to work.

While it’s not what Wigton and his fellow officers label a “problem road,” the Ronald Reagan Freeway is busiest between 6:30 and 9 a.m. when an average of 40,000 cars use the expressway.

“Most days there’s really nothing. You just make the usual stops for speeding and whatnot,” Wigton says. “But sometimes you get that call that maybe lasts for three seconds and you remember it for months.”

Like the time a driver with expired tags refused to stop and instead gunned the engine and sped toward Los Angeles.

Although the driver was eventually arrested without incident, the seconds spent roaring down the highway at 90 mph were enough, Wigton says, to keep the job interesting.

At about 6:30 he notices a truck stopped on the shoulder with the hood up. He pulls over.

A rig blows by at 60 mph, buffeting the patrol car and kicking up dust as it passes.

Wigton speaks with the driver then gets on the radio and calls for a tow truck.

“That’s a lot about what the job’s about,” he says. “Just making sure that people are all right and helping them when we can.”

By 8, a layer of dull gray clouds has blanketed the county.

Wigton receives a message on his CLETS unit--a computer-operated communications unit.

“Get out your rain gear,” the message reads.

A call crackles over the radio.

“Unit 37, 7-0-1. Eleven-eighty-two, southbound 23 at Olsen Road. One lane blocked. Four vehicles. TC,” the dispatcher says.

There has been an accident on the rain-slick California 23.

Although Wigton has not been called to the scene, he is close and decides to offer assistance.

A line of cars is backed up for more than a half mile north from Olsen Road.

Wigton pulls onto the dirt shoulder to reach the four cars in the median.

“This isn’t too bad,” Wigton says. “Just a bunch of looky-loos slowing everything down.”

Another officer is already there, interviewing the drivers, all of whom are fine, though a bit shaken.

Wigton climbs back into his car and resumes his patrol.

“This is pretty much what it’s all about,” Wigton says as he pulls up to a pickup truck to see if the driver has his seat belt on. “We’re just out here to make sure that whatever does happen out here on the highway doesn’t hurt anyone.”

The View From 3,500 Feet

At just a few minutes past 6, KNX Radio traffic reporter Scott West peers down at the line of traffic speeding down the Ventura Freeway near Camarillo.

At 3,500 feet, the six-lane freeway looks like little more than a pair of slender ropes atop the Oxnard Plain’s collage of green rectangles.

“Pretty smooth,” West says before switching on the transmitter and delivering the first of the morning’s dozen or so live reports from the skies above Ventura County.

Dressed in faded bluejeans and a floral print shirt, West is one of the station’s legion of traffic reporters who spend their mornings cramped inside a small plane, alerting drivers on what to expect on the road ahead.

Each day he awakes at 3:30 a.m. to drive from his Redondo Beach home to Van Nuys Airport where he begins the workday.

“Let’s head over to Mugu,” West says to pilot Jeff Carter. “See if anything’s going on over there.”

Carter pulls the single-engine Cessna into a tight right-hand bank and points the nose toward a smooth, mirror-like Pacific.

*

Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands can be seen to the right, jutting from the glassy pink sea like two rocky fists. And to the left, a line of thin, wispy clouds glows pale yellow from the day’s new light.

“Man, this is almost spiritual,” West says.

If anything good can be said about commuting, it’s one of the few common denominators linking most Southern Californians.

But with the more than 1 billion hours state drivers spend stuck in traffic each year, those commonalities are usually shared exclamations of frustration.

But as a recent study by the Southern California Assn. of Governments showed, Ventura County drivers are a pleasant exception to that rule.

With an average one-way commute distance of 17.8 miles, a full 53% of county commuters labeled their drives as “always” or “most often” good, the study found.

Comparatively, only 37% of Los Angeles County drivers felt that way, with about half saying it was “always bad”--none of which comes as a surprise to West.

“I’ve never seen it get really jammed up here,” he says, barely audible above the whirring din of the propeller. “Something pretty major has to happen [in Ventura County] for the kind of tie-up the 405 gets everyday.”

West scribbles notes on a worn steno book.

Pacific Coast Highway is clearing with just a handful of cars navigating its twists and turns at a comfortable 50 mph.

Carter pulls back on the throttle and eases the plane east, toward the Ronald Reagan Freeway.

In less than five minutes West is peering down at the freeway, studying a quarter-mile slowdown near Yosemite Avenue in Simi Valley.

“It’s just the sun,” West says, again jotting notes. “Happens everyday. . . . People can’t see until they get into the mountain’s shadow.”

By 7:30, West and Carter are cruising over the Ojai Valley at about 1,500 feet.

West shifts his attention to the ridges where dozens of recent landslides have exposed the hills’ stony brown core.

“This has been a hell of a year,” West says, recounting the numerous accidents and roadway misadventures he has seen during the rainy season. “On a few of those days when we needed to be up there because the weather was so bad, we couldn’t even take off. . . . Had to do it all in the car.”

Carter points to a high ridge a few miles distant.

“You know Larry Hagman? J.R. from ‘Dallas’?” he asks. “He lives up there on that peak somewhere.”

Carter pulls back on the stick and edges up above the ridgeline.

Buffeting in the breeze, the plane crosses over the peak, revealing Hagman’s white stucco estate. Carter pulls into a tight orbit several hundred feet above the actor’s home.

“Looks like Major Nelson [a Hagman TV character] got a Beetle,” Carter says, pointing out the new Volkswagen parked in the driveway.

By about 8, West and Carter are near Santa Barbara and turning south to observe a 40-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway from Mussel Shoals to Thousand Oaks.

The commute is now at its busiest, but traffic is moving smoothly.

By 9, the two will make their way back to Van Nuys Airport and West will hurry off to his other job managing a Santa Monica radio station.

“There’s not that much to it,” West says. “Just fly a big circle and look down.”

The Morning Drive’s Captive Audience

“Which animal has the finest hair?” asks Dave Ciniero, sorting through tapes laid out on his radio console. “Listeners, here’s a hint. It has two eyes. . . . Yes . . . two eyes.”

Ciniero pushes a green button and the theme from Final Jeopardy begins to play.

“OK, what do you say, ma’am?” he asks.

“A frog.”

“What? Did you say a frog?” Ciniero says, barely able to contain a chuckle. “Well, I’m sorry, but that answer is very, very wrong.”

Factually yes, but for KVEN 1450’s “Dave and Bob Morning Show” it was the perfect reply.

For more than 13 years Ciniero and his partner Bob Adams have been the radio men of choice for an estimated 30,000 listeners who get everything from traffic updates and weather reports to silly games and cash over the course of the four-hour broadcast.

“It’s pretty simple stuff,” Ciniero says during a short commercial break. “We’re not here to break any new ground. We’re just here to have some fun.”

The morning drive, as it’s referred to by professionals, is the coveted time slot for any radio personality.

For a few hours each weekday, radio stations have a captive audience of commuters thumbing through the stations in search of entertainment, news, music and talk.

Understanding this, both Ciniero and Adams try to offer as much variety as they can during the show, which results in long, sometimes dreadful hours preparing.

Although it’s just 5:22 a.m., both Ciniero and Adams have had a long day. As usual, Ciniero came in at about 12:30 a.m. to browse the Internet and newspapers for amusing or oddball blurbs that might tickle the interest of listeners.

It’s not dedication that brings him in so early, he says. It’s just his favorite time of the day.

“I’m a loner,” he quips.

Adams, who is on call 24 hours a day, was rousted from sleep shortly after 3 to report on a house fire in Port Hueneme. He came into the station afterward to splice together sound bites and organize a stack of tape reels for the news.

For the duration of the show, both are crammed into a small wood-paneled studio packed with gadgetry that bristles with knobs, dials and gauges.

Row upon row of tapes are stacked along one wall with labels such as “Cajun music,” “Creaky door” and “Theme from Rawhide.”

On average, Ventura County commuters spend about 27 minutes on their drives to work, a portion of which about 100,000 people use to run a side trip to take the kids to school or grab a cup of coffee.

“There’s definitely a time element with all this,” Ciniero says as he sorts through a stack of advertisements. “You’ve got to keep a pretty quick pace.”

It’s about a minute before 8, and like clockwork the show segues from a lighthearted discussion on exotic vegetable hybrids to the news.

“Good morning, everybody,” Adams begins. “Forecasters predict scattered rain showers throughout the area today with snow in the higher elevations as a new storm moves into Ventura County.”

Adams pushes a button and the voice of a meteorologist comes on the air with details about how much rain residents can expect.

“It’s going to be another one of those days,” he says.

Keeping Watch From Caltrans’ Nerve Center

Standing in the middle of Caltrans’ traffic operations room in Los Angeles, Joe Venegas scratches his head, sighs then pulls his hands down over his face.

It’s a little before 9 a.m. and he has already finished his third cup of coffee.

“What’s going on there?” he asks one of the traffic engineers while pointing up toward a gargantuan map of the Southern California freeway system.

A series of small red lights on the map is lit along a section of the Ronald Reagan Freeway near Rocky Peak Road in Simi Valley, indicating traffic has come to standstill.

The engineer doesn’t know what’s happened, but assumes it’s an accident because just a few minutes earlier traffic was moving at a steady 50 mph clip.

He is right.

A 42-year-old Simi Valley resident is lying dead along the side of the freeway after losing control of his motorcycle and slamming into the back of a truck. Traffic will be slowed for another two hours.

Few people are as fluent in the delicate operation of the morning commute as Venegas.

Managing a crew of a dozen engineers, dispatchers and specialists, it’s Venegas’ job to monitor the progress of the nearly 10 million commuters in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

From the small climate-controlled room he can watch the commute unfold and identify problems that might bring it to a halt.

“This is the nerve center of the entire operation,” he says. “You’ve got to keep on your toes, because in a minute things can change, and it’s usually for the worse.”

*

Since 1972, the California Department of Transportation has relied on a sophisticated network of sensors, cameras and computers to monitor the movement of traffic on every highway in Southern California.

With small, rope-like sensors embedded in the roads, information on speed and traffic density is sent to the center’s bank of computers.

The information is then fed to the map where multicolored lights illustrate the flow of traffic.

With that information, Venegas can make decisions on where to send road crews, when to advise drivers of a problem and how to tweak congestion management systems such as ramp signals.

The current system, however, monitors only a sliver of Ventura County--the Ventura Freeway to Ventu Park Road and the Ronald Reagan Freeway to Madera Road.

By the end of the year, however, Caltrans will open a new center that will monitor all of the county, a move that underscores the realization that the area is no longer just a pastoral island of farms, but a bustling enclave of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Even with the fatality, it’s turning out to be a fairly normal morning.

“Fatal accidents happen everyday, and one isn’t that big of a deal,” said dispatcher Georgetta Blunt. “But sometimes it gets sort of sad. . . . I had to put out a call last week about a guy who was decapitated in an accident. I told the police his body was lying in lanes two and three.”

Another engineer alerts staff members to problems.

The San Diego Freeway near Sunset Boulevard is showing red after a water main break. Initial police reports say water left three lanes submerged, leaving only one lane open.

“Glad I’m not on the 405,” Venegas says as he dials the number for dispatchers at the Department of Water and Power.

It will be several hours before the water is stopped and the break repaired.

By 8:45, traffic is just starting to ebb on some of the busier highways. The Santa Monica Freeway is clear both east and west of Los Angeles. The Harbor Freeway is also clear with some slowing near downtown.

In another hour the commute will be largely over, and Venegas will start dispatching crews to highways across the Southland to clean signs, patch holes and clear debris.

At 3 p.m. he will punch out and head home.

“I don’t think I have to tell anybody how bad traffic can get around here,” he says. “But all of us here work pretty hard to make sure that people get to where they need to go. . . . And that’s never easy.”