Efforts by Caltrans for Car-Pool Lanes

In response to the commentary by William Woollett Jr. (April 16):

When are our government officials going to get their heads out of the sand and come to the realization that the building of transportation corridors, freeways or toll roads are not the answer to our transportation problems? What Orange County needs, or for that matter all of Southern California, is mass transit. Not the mass transit that we presently have, but one that will make the driving public want to get out of their cars and into the trains, buses and monorails.

The building of new freeways or the widening of old ones is nothing more than just putting a Band-Aid over the problem. All one has to do to see this is to drive along the Riverside Freeway into Santa Ana Canyon. When the freeway was first built, it was two lanes each direction, then four, and now in some places six lanes, but it is still nothing more than a parking lot from Anaheim Hills to Corona.

I have heard the argument that the building of these new transportation corridors is going to relieve the traffic congestion on our present freeways. This is not true. Every time a freeway is built it opens up an area for development. If you truly want to relieve the traffic congestion on the present freeways, when or if the Eastern Corridor is built connecting the Riverside Freeway to the Santa Ana Freeway, do not build any on/off ramps. Just allow cars to get on and off at either end of the Eastern Corridor and nowhere in between.

Woollett said, “The philosophy of ‘phasing’ is prudent.” But the first phase must be the construction of a transportation system that will get the people out of their cars rather than a system that will have them sitting in their cars in giant parking lots called freeways, transportation corridors or toll roads.

Residents have the responsibility to let our government officials know that it’s not more roads we want but a true transportation system of light rail, buses, monorail and our cars. This alternative transportation system should be the first phase in Woollett’s “philosophy of phasing.”

BOB SCHNEIDER

Irvine