LOS ANGELES -- Brake lights may be the sight Southern California commuters dread most.
Like strings of unwelcome holiday lights spread across freeways, they're something Steve Tillett sees all too often. In his 22 years as a United Parcel Service driver, he has seen his commute of about 21 miles increase from 20 minutes to more than an hour."You can't get anywhere these days," he said Tuesday after making a delivery in Rosemead, east of Los Angeles. "It's unbelievable. There's just too many people here in Southern California."
And they're spending a lot of time staring at another vehicle's trunk, according to a study released Tuesday.
Los Angeles-area commuters spend 82 hours each per year stuck in traffic, ranking the region No. 1 nationwide in freeway frustration. Los Angeles has been tops in the dubious category every year since 1982, when the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University began its study.
The study estimated that an average driver in Salt Lake City spent 23 hours in congested traffic in 1997.
The study found that in Los Angeles, congestion forces drivers to spend about 50 percent more time in their vehicles during peak travel periods than they otherwise would. For drivers in the San Francisco Bay area -- ranked third worse for congestion -- the increase is about 40 percent.
Like so many other drivers, Raul Hernandez tries to combat Southern California's clogged freeways by trying to avoid them.
Hernandez, who has delivered baked goods in the San Gabriel Valley for 13 years, has created his own survival guide -- a route index showing how to reach his nine stores while touching freeways only once.
"As soon as you see taillights ahead of you, get off as soon as you can," he said. "Sometimes you have to take a residential street at 25 mph ... But it's better to take 25 than zero."
Learning to adapt will become even more important. Over the next 20 years, Los Angeles, Orange and surrounding counties are expected to add 6 million people to the approximately 16 million already there.
The bulk of growth will be in cities on the northern and eastern fringes of the Los Angeles sprawl, said Jeff Lustgarten, spokesman for the Southern California Association of Governments.
"You're going to have that many more people commuting long distance every day," he said. "It's a fairly frightening prospect."
Potential solutions include building dedicated lanes for big-rig trucks, developing high-speed rail and charging drivers for entering freeways during peak travel times. The California Trucking Association advocates building more highways, and keeping existing roads in better shape.
But freeway construction isn't the answer, said Gloria Ohland of the Los Angeles office of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national transportation policy group.
Within five years, 90 percent of new freeways built in California metropolitan areas fill with new traffic, she said.
"We just get in this cycle where we build more roads, and more cars come out to use the roads," Ohland said. "Build it, and they will come."
It's a pattern that Gene Reinhardt, 58, has seen repeated during more than 30 years of driving Southern California freeways. He takes only streets on his rounds as an electronic technician.
"It's just an automatic nightmare," he said. "People don't even talk about it anymore. It's just something we have to go do."