Roy Suruki thought he'd come upon a bad accident on his Thursday morning commute from San Mateo to Milpitas, but it wasn't crumpled cars slowing his drive to a crawl through Palo Alto.

Instead, Suruki and thousands of drivers throughout the state found themselves braking and squinting to read flashing alerts they had never seen before on overhead electronic freeway signs: AMBER ALERT . . . CHILD ABDUCTION . . . WHI FORD BRONCO . . . LIC -- 1AIZ962.

"I thought traffic was flowing pretty good and then it just stopped,'' said Suruki, 30. "Everyone was pretty much just slowing down and reading it. Something about an Amber missing. It flashed so fast you never got to catch the license plate number.''

What Suruki was seeing was part of California's first statewide child-abduction alert flashing on freeway signs from San Diego to Eureka. Within 12 hours, police had caught and killed a kidnapper and saved two teenage girls.

It was quite a debut for the state's new AMBER Alert warning system for child abductions.

What confused many Bay Area commuters and brought freeway traffic to sporadic crawls, also turned thousands of drivers into watchdogs, combing the state's freeways for a kidnapper who snatched two teenage girls about 1 a.m. from a lovers lane near Los Angeles.

More than 700 calls poured in to authorities, and police stopped about 100 Ford Broncos throughout the state. Everyone from the governor to the California Highway Patrol to the parents of the kidnapped girls were gushing over the success of the alert system, launched last week after a recent string of high-profile kidnappings.

Thursday marked the first real test of the system that Gov. Gray Davis ordered after the kidnapping and killing of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion in Orange County.

"Quite frankly it worked wonderfully,'' Los Angeles County Assistant Sheriff Larry Waldie said in a CNN interview. "It's a critical need particularly with a crime with the speed of freeway cars and access to getting away.''

The California Child Safety AMBER Network, unveiled July 24, makes existing systems for broadcasting public emergencies such as earthquakes and power shortages available to police for publicizing missing children cases.

AMBER stands for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, a plan created in Arlington, Texas, after the 1996 kidnapping and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. A dozen states now have AMBER plans, including Utah, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and there are more than two dozen local and regional systems across the country.

Flagman spots stolen Bronco

California's AMBER network includes emergency broadcast notices for the media, Internet messages and statewide law enforcement bulletins.

It was a radio news broadcast that apparently led police to the kidnapper. A highway crew flagman heard the news and noticed the stolen Bronco in a line of stopped cars, then wrote the CHP number in the dirt and called, CHP spokesman Tom Marshall said.

But an unusual addition to California's AMBER system is the use of the electronic changeable message signs along freeways.

The signs were originally installed to alert motorists to upcoming hazards from icy roads to accidents, but Davis has ordered them available to law enforcement for the AMBER alerts.

The California Highway Patrol put AMBER alerts on 316 of the state's 500 freeway signs from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Marshall said. The postings drew 300 calls to CHP headquarters, and 450 more calls to Los Angeles dispatchers, he said.

"These highway signs helped,'' Davis said.

Still, the freeway alerts left many Bay Area motorists annoyed at having to suffer snarled commutes when the crime was hundreds of miles away. Some complained the alerts were dangerously distracting and said they had no time to absorb the information as they drove past.

Nowhere near Bay Area

Suruki said the traffic made him 15 minutes late, and he resented the inconvenience when he later learned the suspect was nowhere near the Bay Area.

"They're causing the traffic. You've got to find a better medium than this, unless you have a really good idea the person is in the area,'' Suruki said.

Bruce Freeman, 40, said that although the freeway sign alerts had little effect on his commute from San Francisco to Redwood City, it flashed past too quickly for him to get the information and he questioned whether the signs should be used for that purpose.

"It's graying the line between news and traffic alerts,'' Freeman said. "On the other hand, you do want to catch these people.''

The AMBER system leaves it up to local authorities to decide when to call a statewide alert. With California averaging 50 to 60 verified child abductions by strangers and more than 500 reports of children missing under suspicious circumstances each year, authorities will have to use judgment in deciding when to make that call.

Suisun City Police flashed a warning Wednesday night over 10 freeway signs in Solano County to help locate a boy they thought was missing. Though not an official AMBER alert, the message generated 30 calls about a white van being sought, said CHP Sgt. Wayne Ziese, spokesman for the Golden Gate division. The nighttime use of the signs caused no reports of traffic problems, he said.

CHP officials conceded the signs caused traffic jams up and down the state Thursday morning but felt it was a small price to pay to help keep children safe.

"I think most people moving around Bay Area freeways are ready for the unpredictable,'' Ziese said. "I think it's something people are willing to participate in if kids are brought home safely.''

By late Thursday, a second statewide AMBER alert went out for a 7-month old baby taken in a stolen vehicle about 1:30 p.m. from San Diego.

"It's going to have to be decided case by case depending on how the information develops,'' Ziese said. "Is this true? Are we crying wolf?''

State officials plan to review how the system worked Thursday to iron out any kinks.

"This is the first time we have done it,'' Marshall said. "Are there ways to do it any better? It worked fine today -- that's how we caught this guy -- but any time you do something new, you want to take another look at it.''