Some O.C. Planners See Faster Traffic Ahead

Fed up with traffic? Ready to sell the house, pack the kids in the car and move to Iowa? Not so fast. Some transportation experts predict that traffic on South County roads, despite enormous growth ahead, will actually speed up.

Three scenic, automated tollways may be operating by the year 2000. Commuter trains will deliver some residents from San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano and Mission Viejo to jobs in Irvine. Major thoroughfares will be widened and extended.

But will the changes end the South County’s nightmarish commute?

When the region is built-out sometime after 2010, the South County population is expected to double to more than 1 million people, while county traffic planners say the network of major roads and freeways will grow by only about 31%. Still, they are optimistic that average commuting speeds will improve--from the current 28 m.p.h. to 32--through more efficient use of the road network.

Considering the findings of The Times Orange County Poll, today’s traffic planners won’t want to hang around if their forecasts are wrong. Traffic congestion is the chief gripe of otherwise happy residents of coastal cities and the tile-roofed communities sprouting on the county’s southern flank, according to the poll. Nearly three out of four said they are dissatisfied with traffic.

The poll also dispelled a common myth that most South County traffic problems are caused by residents commuting to job-rich North County: About 72% of South County respondents said they both live and work there. An even higher number--75%--said they stay south for shopping and entertainment.

Which all means increasing difficulty driving in the South County. Stop-and-go traffic is now common on weekends. Weekday morning and evening traffic jams begin earlier and end later.

Tales of commuter angst can be found in every lane. Kelly Doyle drives 50 miles from his home in San Clemente to his job in Corona as recreation and parks superintendent. He leaves at 5:45 a.m. to beat the traffic.

The commute has been worth it, Doyle said. He loves the coast too much to move inland, and his new job was too good to pass up. “If I leave here by quarter to 6, I can make Corona in an hour,” he said. “If I leave 10 or 15 minutes later, it takes me an hour and 15 minutes. And if I leave at 7 a.m., it’d take me 1 1/2 to 2 hours.”

‘Ruined’ a Friendship

Amy Tucker, 32, a county social worker, spends nearly an hour fighting 23 miles of rush-hour congestion separating her Aliso Viejo condominium from her Santa Ana job. She finds she stays around home more on weekends to avoid the freeways.

“I wouldn’t say the traffic controls my life, but it does make a difference,” Tucker said one Friday while poking along Interstate 5 at 15 m.p.h. on the way home from work. “I think it ruined a really good friendship I had . . . because I wouldn’t get on the freeway to go visit her. I pretty much stay in South County instead of venturing out on the freeway.”

The South County traffic problems are caused by one simple fact: too many people trying to reach the same place at once. The Irvine area has most of the jobs. Mission Viejo and Laguna Niguel have most of the commuters. The result is morning and evening traffic jams at the El Toro Y, the confluence of Interstates 5 and 405.

“The split up there is where everything starts giving up,” said Officer Ken Daily of the California Highway Patrol’s South County office in San Juan Capistrano. “In the mornings, it backs up sometimes 9 miles down past Junipero Serra Road.”

However, some traffic experts, including Steve Hogan, transportation division manager at the county Environmental Management Agency overseeing county road improvements, see hope ahead.

South county development will introduce new roads to relieve existing bottlenecks, and proposed widening projects on I-5 will provide more freeway capacity, they say. Wider acceptance of car pooling and staggered work hours also will help.

Effect of Tollways

“I think we can reduce any stop-and-go to a shorter period of the day, take some traffic off the arterials and turn those back over to their intended purpose of circulating people among neighborhoods,” Hogan said.

More significantly, traffic experts predict that construction during the 1990s of the three planned tollways will ease congestion on I-5 and 405. With an estimated $2-billion price tag to be financed almost entirely by tolls and developer fees, the innovative highways will add nearly 70 new miles of multilane pavement and give motorists an alternative to the two existing interstates as well as the Costa Mesa and Riverside freeways.

“I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t going to happen overnight, but by the time we reach build-out we should have a balanced community in place,” Hogan said. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of hope and optimism in what I’m saying. But people tend over a period of time to find their own level of comfort or convenience. They’re going to try to minimize the hassles they face each day, and driving to work has become one of them.”

Another important factor in relieving traffic congestion could be a shift in South County traffic flow. The current flow is to the north in the morning and south at night. Some experts believe that new business parks in the South County in the coming decades will keep commuters there.

However, others point out that the growth of business parks is a decades-long process, which wouldn’t cause a substantial shift in commuter behavior for years beyond that. They say the Irvine area will remain the principal job magnet for the South County. And job growth will continue to outpace population gains--meaning a continued daily influx of employees from Riverside and north San Diego county.

No Speed Changes Seen

“All the business parks built in the south will help, but there’s still going to be a dominant flow to the north each morning,” said Dale Ratzlaff, a Caltrans deputy district director for planning in Orange County.

And even if Interstate 5 is widened to 10 or 12 lanes and the tollways built, average freeway speeds will remain about the same as they are today, he predicted. Rush hour traffic jams, however, should shrink back to an hour in the morning and an hour at night.

Most motorists would welcome any glimmer of improvement.

“You do not touch I-5 on weekends around here,” said Dennis Morales of San Clemente, who enjoys a short five-mile commute to his job at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. “I find myself not doing things I used to. I love to go to Dodger Stadium. I was raised and bred on the Dodgers. But the only time I see them now is on TV.”

The reasons for South County traffic woes are as puzzling as a freeway cloverleaf.

Some say the crunch began in the early ‘70s when Newport Beach residents shot down plans for the Pacific Coast Freeway, a multilane highway that would have have sliced through scenic oceanfront land. Planners later stumbled repeatedly in the search for an alternative, while Orange County state and local lawmakers proved largely ineffective in securing state and federal funds for new roads.

If alternatives had been found when the county’s building boom started, no crisis would exist now, said Bruce Nestande, a former supervisor and current state Transportation Commission member. “In past years, people were just deferring (finding solutions) and saying the I-5 and 405 would carry every one.”

Today, county officials are working to get a bigger share of state transportation money. A new growth management plan is in effect to help ensure that roads and other public facilities keep pace with growth. And developers are cooperating more fully to make sure key connector roads are in place before subdivisions are occupied.

Cooperative Effort

A dozen large landowners east of Interstate 5, for example, have joined together in a cooperative effort dubbed the Foothill Circulation Phasing Plan to build or finance 133 miles of roadways and improvements to 40 existing intersections. More than a third of the roads will serve existing residents, with an overall goal of reducing traffic on I-5, said Al Hollinden, a transportation consultant working with the group.

Some local lawmakers and traffic experts say many important road upgrades in the South County will be dashed or delayed dramatically unless additional funding is reaped from a proposed countywide half-cent sales tax measure headed for the November ballot.

“The state isn’t going to have the money to finance the number of road enhancements we need here in Orange County,” said Nestande, who works for an Orange County development firm. “The next year is one of the most critical in the county’s history. Without the tax, we won’t be able to improve our road capacity. We’ll have more smog. We’ll have more congestion.”

Others, however, contend that the proposed half-cent sales tax increase and roadway improvements that would spring from it are little more than a short-term fix. While a number of these critics support the tax, they suggest that its emphasis on road construction instead of alternative solutions like improved rail and bus systems is a mistake.

“It’s the refrain of the dinosaur,” said Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, who hopes to see a 15-mile monorail built during the next decade to link the city’s business center with the airport and a planned train station. “It’s just not possible for our road system to work effectively unless we have a more balanced transportation system that includes transit. We still have this misguided notion that roads themselves are a solution to our mobility problems.”

Agran predicted factors such as higher parking prices and heightened concern about air quality will force motorists to alternatives. Laguna Beach Mayor Robert F. Gentry agrees.

‘In a Crisis’

“We have not bitten the bullet of getting people out of their cars by any possible means,” Gentry said. “We’ve got to . . . act like we’re in a crisis, because we are in a crisis.”

Ray Catalano, an Irvine resident and UC Berkeley professor who specializes in the health effects of urban planning decisions, suggests that South County residents and lawmakers need to carefully consider the consequences of an all-out road construction effort. New roads could improve traffic but also usher in unbridled development that would erode the quality of life in the region, he argued.

“We can go on with the new sales tax and add more roads and more development--we might even get a better balance of roads to development,” Catalano said. “But the question remains: What kind of place will this be if we provide all that capacity for all that development? You may be able to get there 10 minutes faster, but do you want to be there when you get there?”

South County’s Worst Intersection The Environmental Management Agency, which oversees the entire county road network, reports that, according to its ongoing vehicle counts, this intersection has the longest delay periods. How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Orange County Poll was conducted by Mark Baldassare & Associates June 28 to July 1 in a telephone survey of 800 randomly selected Orange County adult residents on weekend days and weekday nights. Half were chosen from listed telephone prefixes north of the Costa Mesa Freeway and half from the south. Results were weighted to reflect the actual 1989 population distribution of North and South County.

About 70% of Orange County residents live in the north and 30% in the south. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 3.5% for the total sample. For subgroups it is larger. For the north and south subsamples, the margin of error is plus or minus 5%. All interviews were confidential; however, some respondents who agreed were later re-interviewed for news stories.