Data Shows the County Has 68% More People Per Mile of Road Than in 1960 : REAL ESTATE

Real estate industry consultant Al Gobar was an academic before he became an entrepreneur, and he still has an academic’s love for statistics.

Gobar said in a recent talk that he was dismayed 25 years ago to find that nobody had developed a statistic for how much additional land was used, and for what purpose, as the population of an urban area increased.

So he developed such a statistic and concluded that for each 1,000 people added to the population, the additional land consumed was 120 acres, of which 22% to 25% was used for streets and roads and highways and freeways.

Come we now to the county’s traffic crunch. Gobar found that nobody in the county has charted the acreage converted to streets, roads, etc.

Undaunted, he dug up statistics showing that in 1960, there were 3,173 miles of roads, about 720,000 residents and about 166,000 jobs in the county.

That works out to about 227 residents and 52 local jobs per mile of asphalt.

In 1985, the last date for which all three figures are available, there were 5,037 miles of roads, streets and the like crisscrossing the county.

That appears to be a pretty hefty increase. Up about 59% in fact.

But the county’s population that year was about 2.1 million, up about 192% from 1960. And that works out to about 381 people per mile of road--about 68% more people per mile than in 1960.

Even worse, from a congestion point of view, there were about 906,000 jobs in the county in 1985, or about 180 workers per mile of roadbed--almost 3 1/2 times as many as in 1960.

The reason the ratio of workers to mile of road increased so much more than the ratio of residents to miles is that a lot of people who work here can’t afford to live here. Many commute to Orange County from Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

As Gobar’s numbers show, the pace of residential, commercial and office development in Orange County has far outstripped the construction of roads needed to handle the increased traffic.