OCTC Orders Wide Study of Rail-Transit Options

A sweeping study of Orange County’s rail-transit options into the next century was ordered Monday by the Orange County Transportation Commission.

Linking the monorail planned for John Wayne Airport with the new Irvine Amtrak station is among the projects to be considered, as well as new commuter train service from Riverside and the extension into Orange County of a proposed Los Angeles County light-rail line beyond its currently planned terminus in Norwalk.

The commission also will explore the feasibility of connecting these with other rail lines--including the proposed California-Nevada, high-speed bullet train from Las Vegas--using interlocking stations. Such terminals would allow passengers to transfer from one type of train to another, even when the trains themselves do not share compatible equipment.

Commission officials said they would contract with a private consulting firm for the countywide rail study, probably in January.

“My opinion was that several Transportation Commission members are serving on different agencies that have rail projects in their future, but that there was no coordination between the different projects,” said commission member Clarice A. Blamer, who proposed the countywide study during the OCTC’s meeting Monday in Santa Ana.

“My feeling was that it (the countywide study) should be the master plan of rail service for Orange County,” Blamer added.

County Supervisor Don R. Roth, who also serves as a member of both the OCTC the Orange County Transit District, is the county’s representative to the California-Nevada High Speed Train Commission. On Monday, Stanley T. Oftelie, the OCTC’s executive director, said he had accepted an invitation to join the high-speed train panel’s technical advisory committee.

Until now, individual county officials have been lobbying for their favorite projects.

Las Vegas officials have proposed construction of a high-speed train between Las Vegas and Southern California, with a stop possibly in Anaheim.

Irvine is studying the possibility of connecting the McDonnell Douglas-funded monorail planned for the airport area with the city’s new Amtrak station.

Blamer is strongly advocating new commuter trains from Riverside along the Santa Fe railroad tracks that parallel the Riverside Freeway.

And Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, also a commission member, has been talking to Los Angeles County Transportation Commission officials about connecting that county’s planned light-rail system to the main north-south rail line that provides Amtrak service within Orange County and to Los Angeles and San Diego.

Also, the OCTC for some time has been planning additional commuter trains along the Amtrak route but has lacked the money to do more than pay for track improvements necessary before new trains could be purchased.

At Monday’s meeting, OCTC panel members committed several hundred thousand dollars for improvement of commuter service between San Clemente and Los Angeles along the Amtrak route. The allocation was made in order to attract more than $1 million in various federal grants for additional track improvement.

Commissioners want a countywide rail study now, partly for political reasons.

The commission has developed a 20-year, $19.5-billion master plan of transportation improvements, but the document contains no rail transit and has a projected $8-billion funding shortfall.

County officials and business leaders hope to offset the shortfall with proceeds from a half-cent county sales tax, which they hope will be submitted to voters by 1990. A recent public opinion survey conducted for the OCTC revealed that half the voters would support a half-cent tax if they knew that a portion of the funds would be used for increased Amtrak service. If voters knew that a portion would finance a new rail transit system in the county, 61% of them would favor the tax, the survey concluded.

But voters countywide rejected a 1-cent sales tax proposal by nearly a 3-to-1 margin in June, 1984, that would have paid for highway and transit projects, including a 38-mile light-rail system linking Fullerton with the John Wayne Airport area and serving major employment areas and shopping centers in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa.

Oftelie said the commission’s new study will concentrate on linking currently planned projects into a coherent system, rather than trying to re-introduce ill-fated proposals.