RESEARCH: MOTORISTS TRULY SICK OF CITY TRAFFIC.

Byline: Lisa Mascaro Staff Writer

Commuting in heavy traffic can drive up your blood pressure, put you in a dark mood, ruin your whole day.

That's the finding of a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the past two decades studying thousands of commuters and documenting the physical and psychological dangers of gridlock.

``Most people having to drive an hour and half for a distance of 40 miles are bothered by that commute,'' said Professor Raymond W. Novaco, a psychologist and professor of social ecology.

``It's not just subjectively being bothered - their mood. It affects their blood pressure, tolerance for frustration, their cognitive efficiency.''

Many studies have tallied the economic cost of sitting in gridlock: the 136 hours a year Los Angeles County residents spend stuck in traffic; the $2,510 per person in lost time; the 260 gallons of wasted fuel, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California.

But often unaccounted for is the emotional toll that comes from bracing for the worst every time you climb behind the wheel.

Dads who get home from the office after hours on the road, just in time to tuck their little ones into bed. Working moms who sweat as they sit in traffic, certain they're going to miss their day-care pickup deadline. Drivers across the region who refuse to leave their neighborhoods on weekends, certain they'll get stuck on the road.

Just ask Dierdre Dickerson, who is so fed up with her weekday Van Nuys- to-South Bay commute, she's ready to find a new home closer to the office.

``It's the constant source of contention. You do it for so long, I realize I can't stand it anymore,'' said Dickerson, who has been making her 34-mile commute for 12 years. ``I like the Valley, but we're out of there.''

Dickerson tries to outsmart the traffic - she takes side streets to avoid the 101-405 interchange in the morning, and gets a head-start on the evening rush by leaving work at 4:30 p.m.

Still, nothing seems to work. What had been a 45-minute one-way evening commute a decade ago to her job in corporate communications now takes more than two hours.

``I'm still not home until 7. Maybe I'll eat something, then it's time to go to sleep because I have to get up at 5,'' she said.

``That's just crazy. That's no quality of life at all. ... You need time to just kind of decompress. Then maybe I'll be a human being.''

Novaco's landmark studies, starting in the 1970s, have provided a snapshot of the emotional toll traffic takes on commuters.

Not only does commuters' physical health suffer with rising blood pressure, his research found that traffic cuts their tolerance for frustration and cognitive ability - as measured by the extent to which drivers tested in the studies would persist at solving a difficult puzzles or find proofreading errors, he explained.

But even more, he found that the evening commute kills the mood at home.

``The more congested the evening commute was, the more negative the mood at home in the evening,'' he said in an interview last week.

Novaco said his researchers tried many ways to eliminate that effect by testing for other factors - such as commuters' income, age, education, job satisfaction or desire to move to another neighborhood.

To no avail.

``The effect kept getting stronger,'' he said. ``It was always there.''

Dickerson can attest to the real-life drain.

Her morning commute, she said, isn't as bad - she hits the road at 6:15 a.m., and takes her side streets before hooking up with the San Diego Freeway once she's out of the Valley. ``I breeze in in the morning because that's fairly early.''

But it's the evening ride she can't seem to conquer. None of her alternative strategies have proven fruitful.

She said the new southbound car-pool lane of the San Diego Freeway has helped, and asks when Caltrans will build a much-anticipated northbound one over the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley - the southbound lane has shaved up to 18 minutes off the morning drive since it opened this year.

But it's not slated to begin construction until 2006.

``I'm just amazed when I look at the line of cars at the on-ramp,'' she said ``(Then), once you get there, it's bumper to bumper as far as the eye can see.''

LET US KNOW

How's your commute? Tell us about the routes you take, time you spend to get around. Send your comments, along with your name and a way to contact you, to: dnmetro(at)dailynews.com.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo:

(color) Dierdre Dickerson's 34-mile commute from Van Nuys to Gardena takes her more than two hours each way.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer

Box:

LET US KNOW (see text)