Traffic slightly down?

A database maintained by UC Berkeley and Caltrans shows that traffic in May of this year on many routes in the six-county Southland region was down slightly from May '07. The question: Is it a trend or an aberration or is something else going on? High gas prices combined with higher unemployment? It's hard to say.

The data, for example, say that if you were to leave Riverside at 8 a.m. on a weekday in May '07, it would take 40.3 minutes to drive to Ontario. In May this year, that dropped to 35.9 minutes -- more than a 10% improvement. Most of the improvements aren't that dramatic, although the numbers suggest that rush hour traffic has softened on the 101 between L.A. and Thousand Oaks.

Of course, there's reason for skepticism too. The database says that it takes only about 20 minutes to drive from L.A. to Santa Monica at 8 a.m. on a weekday. Last time I made that drive, it was 20 minutes to get to La Brea.

-- Steve Hymon, "Road Sage"