An hour later, cars are crawling at 17mph on the same stretch of road. traffic bustling along at 69 mph on the Antelope Valley Freeway at Sierra Highway. One recent traffic report from Caltrans shows 5 a.m. Lancaster and Palmdale commuters coming down the Antelope Valley Freeway to their jobs around Los Angeles, for example, report gridlock at 5:30 a.m., even in car-pool lanes. “It shows traffic on roads getting worse.”īut as a growing number of motorists hit the roadways earlier, it’s creating a domino effect by making even more motorists bump up their commute times even earlier. “They are willing to leave quite early to avoid the traffic and find a spot, so they shift their schedules,” said Seiji Steimetz, economics professor at Long Beach State. It gives you more time to eat breakfast and read your paper.”Ĭommuting students at California State University, Long Beach, also have discovered the luxury of leaving home a little bleary-eyed to beat the rush of traffic and score coveted parking spots on campus.Īfter getting to school, some sleep or study in their cars. “You regain more time to do things by leaving at 5 a.m. “Part of the leaving-early crowd are people who don’t want to deal with crowds,” said Rizzo, now a Fullerton-based transportation expert. On days he had more energy, Rizzo used the extra time to read the newspaper or catch up on some work. Usually arriving by 5:30 a.m., Rizzo grabbed extra winks by pulling into supermarket parking lots and sleeping in his car. to beat traffic on his 75-mile drive to his podiatry job in Long Beach. When he lived in Colton, David Rizzo woke up at 4 a.m. is the only way to get to the office on time from homes in the hinterlands. is multidimensional.”įor those who do work traditional hours, getting behind the wheel before 6a.m. “It’s not the traditional 9 to 5 anymore. “You have more people working in different ways,” Kyser said. It also reflects the growing number of industries in the area – from entertainment and finance to manufacturing – that do not follow mainstream work hours. The increase in pre-dawn commutes shows more people working in step with different time zones – from the East Coast to Asia, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. And the increase in pre-dawn commutes is making broad changes in both social and economic arenas as businesses scramble to open earlier to accommodate motorists, and commuters rearrange myriad pieces of their lives to cope with the traffic maze.
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