Mission Viejo Fears Cars of Its Neighbors

When Mission Viejo residents glance eastward across the valleys, they can see the area’s future unfolding. And even when it’s visible through the smog, it can look alarming.

All along the dry hills of the southeastern county, huge new housing developments are taking root: Robinson Ranch, Dove Canyon, Coto de Caza, Portola Highlands and Rancho Santa Margarita are among developments in various stages of construction, each expected to draw thousands of new residents to the already-crowded traffic corridors traversing South County.

For many of those new homeowners, getting to jobs will mean hitting the freeway every morning. And getting to Interstate 5 will mean crossing Mission Viejo, where residents already complain that traffic is backed up.

Despite road improvements that will ease some strain, critics worry that traffic jams of five and ten minutes will stretch to two and three times that, turning today’s traffic headaches into tomorrow’s migraines.

“How we’re going to handle all these new people and cars is the $64,000 question,” Mission Viejo Councilman Norman P. Murray said.

With Mission Viejo grappling to control traffic within its boundaries, the perimeter development is a complicating and infuriating phenomenon. The city has no power to control it, but officials fret that the city could be at least a short-term victim of the boom-town economy.

Rancho Santa Margarita, for instance, is just one of the developments guaranteed to strain the area’s road network, as the mixed-use community grows from about 12,000 people today to 40,000 to 50,000 when built out by the end of the 1990s.

Although Rancho Santa Margarita will include business and industrial areas to provide jobs for some residents, others will be forced to take to the highways--and may pass through Mission Viejo en route to work.

Developments such as Coto de Caza and Dove Canyon are smaller, with fewer than 6,000 homes expected for each. But they too will add to traffic.

To address the pressure those developments and others will add, developers have banded together to pay for the Foothill Corridor Phasing Plan, an ambitious, privately funded, $250-million road program that marked an important moment Thursday when officials ceremonially began construction of a bridge expansion near Rancho Santa Margarita.

Most important among the phasing plan projects is the Foothill Transportation Corridor, which will run to the east of Mission Viejo and parallel to I-5. That project is expected to be completed by about 1993 and is designed to shuttle traffic around Mission Viejo’s borders.

“I think that the traffic will really be alleviated,” said Anthony R. Moiso, president of the Santa Margarita Co. “There has always been concern about the traffic in Mission Viejo, and I’m sure there always will be. But this is an urban county now. This isn’t ranch country, but some people, when they squint their eyes, like to think that it still is.”

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, a strong proponent of the phasing plan, said it will spare Mission Viejo crippling traffic and link the region in a unified traffic plan. Vasquez and others note that the traffic improvements under the phasing plan will go ahead regardless of whether the proposed half-cent sales tax increase known as Measure M passes.

“This is not contingent on anything having to do with Measure M,” Vasquez said at the bridge ceremony Thursday. “This is going forward and doing the job.”

Still, some Mission Viejo officials worry.

“We’re going to need to identify the traffic volume, from whatever source, and begin planning for it, even if it means controlling our own growth to make room on our streets,” Councilman Robert A. Curtis said.

Curtis is among many city leaders who say growth around Mission Viejo could affect the city nearly as much as internal decisions about development. As the city prepares its first general plan, a land-use document that will chart growth within the city limits, external development remains a troublesome wild card.

“We really don’t know exactly what will be developing out there,” said General Plan Advisory Committee Chairman Glen K. Godfrey, gesturing out his office windows in the direction of the eastern hills.

“If there’s a large buildup to the east of Mission Viejo,” he said, “understandably there’s going to be a traffic buildup in the city, as people try to get to the freeway. But how big that’s going to be, we just don’t know yet.”

Preliminary traffic studies show that the city already groans under the strain of congestion in a few places. La Paz Road, which cuts east to west across the center of the city, has a “D” congestion rating, which in traffic engineering parlance indicates the “worst acceptable” level. Short stretches of Trabuco Road and Jeronimo Road, both north-to-south corridors, rate an “E,” indicating that “notable delays” are common.

“People are saying, ‘I like living in South County, but I need a break from the traffic,’ ” said Mission Viejo Councilwoman Victoria C. Jaffe. “While we have our roads, we desperately need improvements. We have to plan for it, and we have to pay for it.”

Jaffe predicted that traffic problems will not be solved until the region grapples with basic changes in the way people live and work.

Public transportation, communities that integrate jobs and housing and widespread car pooling will ultimately relieve the area’s traffic crunch, she said.

Those changes may be years off, but until they come to pass--or at least until the street and highway improvements are complete--residents may simply have to grin and bear it.

“I’m convinced that we’re going to sit down 10 years from now, and it’s going to be beautiful,” Councilman Murray said. “But in the meantime, there’s going to be some congestion, no doubt about it.”