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Put away your fantasies of a shorter commute to downtown Los Angeles, or of traffic-free residential streeets in Pasadena. There will be no connection with the 110 Freeway, and there will be no onramps or offramps between Del Mar Avenue in Pasadena and Huntington Drive in northeast Los Angeles.

The 710 is not about getting traffic off Pasadena streets, or providing a freeway route to downtown Los Angeles for folks in the San Gabriel Valley. It's about creating a bypass to shift 20 percent of the traffic off of Interstate 5 through downtown Los Angeles to our area. Caltrans calls it "balancing the regional freeway network". In short, it's great for someone in San Bernardino County, or a truck coming from the harbor, but it does nothing to improve local transportation needs because you and I will be squeezed out by new regional traffic from fast-growing surrounding communities.

Caltrans studies anticipate that traffic on the 210 and 134 freeways through Pasadena will actually increase if the 710 freeway is constructed, as the Foothill Freeway will join the San Bernardino and Pomona freeways as major commuter corridors for the growing inland counties.

Get ready for more "sig-alerts" and traffic advisories as rush hour reaches through Pasadena. Like rats in a maze, commuters who live outside Pasadena will use our streets, trying to find new ways around increasingly congested freeways.

This "spillover" traffic during peak periods has already been estimated by Korve Engineering, in a study for the City of Pasadena from 1992. Here's what they predicted for traffic at major Pasadena intersections:

• Orange Grove at Fair Oaks: 20.9 percent increase
• Marengo at Walnut: 28.2 percent increase in northbound traffic
• California at Pasadena Avenue: 15.2 percent increase in eastbound traffic, and 87.4 percent in westbound traffic
• Colorado at Fair Oaks: 37.2 percent increase in eastbound traffic, and 18.9 percent in westbound traffic
• Del Mar between St. John and Orange Grove: 753 percent increase (note there's no decimal point there!)
• Del Mar at Fair Oaks: 55.4 percent increase in westbound traffic
• Colorado at Los Robles: 38.7 percent increase in westbound traffic
• Villa at Los Robles: 72.1 percent increase in eastbound traffic
• Villa at Altadena Drive: 206.6 percent increase in eastbound traffic
• Orange Grove at Altadena Drive: 1,140 percent increase in eastbound traffic
• Washington at Fair Oaks: 66.3 percent increase in eastbound traffic, and 18.2 percent in westbound traffic
• Washington at Los Robles: 21.3 percent increase
• Washington at Lake: 24.1 percent increase