Proposals for Solving County’s Traffic Jams

As a founding, now-retired member of Drivers for Highway Safety, I both agree and disagree with its newest proposals as outlined (Nov. 14).

I agree that the Orange County Transportation Commission should resign en masse. They have added nothing but political favoritism to the woes of Orange County’s traffic mess, and on the basis of any objective standard, have been, as a group, an abysmal failure.

I disagree with the position that all car pools should be eliminated and that there is no place for mass transit in Orange County.

Car pools today are a fact of driver reality, and will likely remain so for long past most of our lives. To tilt at these “windmills” is to deny the facts and weaken the desire for other, now more important changes.

The first of these is to address the patent stupidity of keeping these lanes closed to mixed use, 24 hours a day. Opening the car-pool lanes from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. would not, in the words of one Caltrans official, be “too complicated.”

Orange County drivers can handle this complexity, just as have the drivers in the San Jose-San Francisco corridor on Route 101 for a number of years.

DON COULSON

Orange