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David Letterman's last joke of the night is just a couple of hours old when the alarm clock sounds in Leslie and Gary Smedley's bedroom.
At 3:30 a.m. every weekday, Leslie gets ready for work. In a little more than an hour, she'll be on her way from the narrow gravel and asphalt lanes that make up the high desert settlement of Phelan, just 13 minutes from the ski lifts in Wrightwood, to her job as a phone operator at Pacific Bell in Garden Grove. She spends more than four hours on the road most days, covering 170 miles round trip.
That marathon commute is hardly unusual in sprawling, car-clogged Southern California. Soaring housing prices in coastal areas like Orange County have forced many workers to move to less-pricey inland locales, ushering in an era of ever-longer commutes across the Southland. Others, like the Smedleys, have chosen to take on the long commute so they can enjoy the country life style.
The result has been a shift in the foibles and habits of the motoring public. Long-distance commuters are now leaving home earlier than ever before in their efforts to make it to work on time, transportation experts say. The morning rush hour lasts more than three hours these days, with some freeways reaching gridlock as early as 5:30 a.m., according to California Department of Transportation officials.
Afternoons are even worse, with intense congestion typically clogging the freeways of Orange County from about 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. on workdays.
"It's mind-boggling," said Joe El-Harake, Caltrans's commuter lanes coordinator in Orange County. "People are resorting to getting up early just to get to work on time. Suddenly, they're traveling at awful hours . . . and they're trapped in this situation."
Unfortunately, it doesn't promise to get much better. The number of motorists driving into the region from Riverside and San Bernardino counties, for instance, is expected to explode.
Traffic on the Riverside Freeway, which handles the bulk of the inland motorists surging into the county, has doubled in less than a decade, jumping from 106,000 motorists a day in 1980 to more than 220,000 in 1988. By the year 2010, transportation experts predict, more than 400,000 motorists will be using the freeway each day.