And should an accident occur somewhere along the freeway, which is common, the traffic can be much, much worse.Īnd the hours that constitute the afternoon commute are getting longer - much longer. In 2011, Peinado said, traffic slow-downs usually started only a few miles south of the county line. “There has been a significant growth in the length of queues and the decreases of speeds,” he said. Peinado said traffic volumes on I-15 from Route 76 to the Riverside County border - an eight-mile stretch of freeway - have increased by 10 percent since 2010. People don’t like crawling along a highway for an hour and would rather take a “shortcut” that probably won’t save them much time, but will alleviate some of the boredom because they will be moving faster, albeit on what is probably a longer route. Marcelo Peinado, district division chief of traffic operations for Caltrans in San Diego and Imperial counties, said it all has to do with I-15. That’s going to be a problem until the end of time.” If people have figured out a good shortcut to get around stuff, they are more than welcome to take that path. You can’t tell somebody you can’t go this way.
“We cannot stop people from driving where they want. “It’s a difficult issue,” said California Highway Patrol spokesman Jim Bettencourt.
