After lockdowns, vacationers free to flee

More than 3.3 million Southern Californians are expected to take trips over the holiday weekend

Free from more than a year of pandemic restrictions, scores of Southern Californians are leaving town for an Independence Day weekend like few others this past year.

With little to no tourism for 16 months, experts say travelers should expect “record” levels of traffic clogging roadways and airport thoroughfares.

Travelers will face some obstacles, too, such as high gas prices and a hiring shortage that has stymied fuel deliveries at gas stations and left major airlines short of pilots.

Despite those issues, the Automobile Club of Southern California projects a strong bounce back in travel over the Independence Day weekend.

More than 3.3 million Southern Californians are expected to take trips over the holiday weekend — a 46% increase from last year when travel was

discouraged.

More than 86% are expected to drive to their destinations, while more than 13% will fly, and about 1% will go by other means since cruises from American ports are canceled and fewer people are using trains or buses.

“We expect car travel to be the highest on record and air travel to be the third-highest amount since AAA started tracking data in 2001,” Filomena Andre, the

Auto Club’s vice president for travel, said in a statement.

Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service, said gas stations are experiencing outages across the nation in such states and areas as California, the Pacific Northwest, Colorado and Iowa, as well as Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

“It used to be an afterthought for station owners to schedule truck deliveries,” Kloza said. “Now it’s job No. 1.”

The increased fuel demand for July equates to about 2,500 to 3,000 more deliveries needed nationwide every day.

“There just aren’t the drivers to do that,” Kloza said.

A shortage of drivers is a problem throughout the trucking industry and but it takes special qualifications to drive a tank truck, making that shortage worse than in other sectors.

RICHARD VOGEL — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SoCal residents who travel this holiday weekend will be paying the highest gas prices in seven years or more, and they may also find that some stations are out of gas due to a shortage of tank-truck drivers.