Take the high road

Pity the folks with the thankless task of routing a highway in Southern California. The road will either displace or annoy the people who live and work along its path, or it will swallow and degrade increasingly scarce open space.

That said, toll road officials in Orange County chose a particularly troubling route for a new six-lane expressway. The proposed Foothill South Toll Road, which would bisect a private wilderness preserve and traverse the narrow length of an undeveloped coastal canyon, should not be built.

The toll road faces a probably hostile hearing before the Coastal Commission next week, after the commission’s staff produced a scathing report. The Transportation Corridor Agencies could scarcely have mapped a more environmentally damaging route, the report says, threatening harm to several important endangered species and one of the few healthy coastal creeks in the region. It would cut along the entire length of the pristine canyon that makes up most of San Onofre State Beach, passing within a few hundred feet of its campground. The park is visited by 2.7 million people a year.

“The project is fundamentally inconsistent with the spirit and letter of . . . the Coastal Act,” the report says.

Less attention has been paid to the road’s proposed path through the Donna O’Neill Land Conservancy, a patch of wilderness in southeastern Orange County.

The irony is that both the conservancy and the park campground were created as mitigation to soften the effects of other developments. The state should not go down the road of allowing such set-asides to be harmed for more development. The Transportation Corridor Agencies’ offer of $100 million to offset the damage barely begins to compensate the public for the resources lost.

The toll road is essentially a route to nowhere. It doesn’t connect two destinations -- say, Inland Empire residents and Orange County jobs. Rather, it is intended mainly as a diversion route to lighten congestion on Interstate 5, a real and growing problem; the hope is that commuters will be willing to go out of their way, taking a route farther east and paying more than $4 each way, to avoid traffic jams. That strategy failed with the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, the other diversion highway built by the agency. And a report from the Orange County Transportation Authority said that although the toll road would help alleviate I-5 traffic, the freeway would still be jammed.

In fact, by building in less-developed zones, the toll road might contrarily worsen congestion by opening more areas to suburban sprawl.

The Transportation Corridor Agencies -- which to its credit spent an enormous amount of time and effort weighing various routes -- has avoided looking at widening the existing freeway through the congested areas with toll lanes. Those have proved wildly popular elsewhere. Toll road officials understandably want to bypass the considerable cost and legal wrangling involved in condemning developed property. But there is ample precedent -- including northern stretches of the I-5 in Orange County -- for going this route successfully. The Coastal Commission report recommends the same solution, along with improvements to surface streets.

The wilderness can’t speak up for itself the way property owners can, but major damage to natural public resources comes with its own tremendous cost.