County Unveils Options to Ease Freeway Jams

County transportation officials Monday unveiled a series of options for easing a growing freeway bottleneck in central Orange County, ranging from an underground freeway in east Tustin to a program of surface street improvements throughout Orange, Tustin and Irvine.

Many of the proposals would displace hundreds of homes and businesses in some of eastern Orange County’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Most would cost several hundred million dollars, and at least one project is needed if traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway is to keep moving, according to a preliminary report from Gruen Associates, a Los Angeles architectural and engineering firm.

“Clearly, what these interim results show are that there are very high social and economic costs associated with all of the alternatives, particularly the freeway alternatives,” said Sharon Greene, project manager for the Orange County Transportation Commission. “It will not be easy to solve this.”

The “bottleneck analysis,” scheduled for presentation to the public Thursday night at Santiago Junior High School in Orange, addresses what is already a problem on the portion of the Santa Ana Freeway where the Garden Grove, Costa Mesa and Orange freeways converge on the overloaded facility.

While the problem will be temporarily alleviated with future widening of the Santa Ana Freeway, it will be even worse in future years when the planned Foothill and Eastern freeways dump thousands of additional cars a day from the rapidly developing foothills of southeast Orange County back onto the Santa Ana Freeway, traffic studies show.

The resulting “bottleneck” between Myford Road and the Garden Grove Freeway promises to back up traffic down much of the length of the Santa Ana Freeway unless some alternative route through central Orange County is found and built, the studies show.

Early Next Century

The preliminary report released Monday looks at options for improvements early in the next century, including new freeways, improved surface streets and an elevated transitway above several freeways. Though county officials have not yet given preference to any of the alternatives, the report does indicate that only the transitway or a new freeway through the Orange/Tustin area would significantly relieve congestion on the Santa Ana Freeway.

The preliminary analysis from Gruen Associates lists these options as the most effective at relieving freeway congestion:

- A new freeway along what is now Foothill Boulevard in the high-priced ranch-style community of Lemon Heights, or along La Colina Drive just south of Foothill. To help alleviate impacts on the surrounding community, this option proposes to build the freeway below ground level or to run it through a tunnel beneath some of the most expensive neighborhoods.

Such a freeway would carry about 140,000 cars a day--significantly reducing traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway--but it would cost about $340 million. The above-ground option would displace 600 homes, two churches, two schools and several businesses, while the number of homes displaced would be reduced to 250 by tunneling underground for part of the freeway. The tunneling would raise costs to $640 million, however.

- An elevated transitway along the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways for car pools and buses, making way for additional travel lanes in the median of both freeways. It would cost about $270 million to build the transitway and accompanying freeway lanes.

- Some congestion relief would also be available through an $850-million plan to extend the Orange Freeway south along the Santa Ana River to the San Diego Freeway, though how much relief that would provide is not yet know, the study said.

Other freeway options examined in the study, including freeways along Santiago Creek and Chapman Avenue, would probably not divert enough traffic from the Santa Ana Freeway to justify their expense, the report’s findings suggest.

Thursday’s meeting will begin with an open house at 5 p.m. in which citizens will have an opportunity to personally discuss the study’s findings with study team members. At 7 p.m. a formal presentation of alternatives will be presented.