Making a Case for Car-Pool Lanes : Prop. 111 Would Aid Riverside and Orange Counties

Picture families living at opposite ends of a gravel road. One owns a prosperous farm. The grown sons from the other family earn income by planting and harvesting the farm’s crops.

Keeping the road open is important to both, but it is hard work and the farmer never seems to be able to lay hands on money to pay for it. So the sons keep the road open. But they also keep a meticulous ledger because they hope that the farmer will get his financial act together some day and pay them for it.

This is not a fable but the true story of Riverside and Orange counties and about a road, state Highway 91, that carries 200,000 cars between the counties every day.

There are plans to increase the commuter capacity of the Riverside Freeway by creating two car-pool lanes in each direction along a 12-mile stretch where the county lines meet. The $90-million project would also provide single car-pool lanes on other sections of the freeway. In a well-ordered society, the costs of the car-pool lanes--crucial to both counties--would be shared and the project carefully coordinated. That has not happened. Thus, this is also a tale about one more example of the many possibilities for cutting rush-hour congestion that would result from voter approval of Proposition 111 on the June 5 ballot.

Orange County is the recalcitrant neighbor in the story, having twice turned down measures that would finance transportation improvements with a modest half-cent sales-tax increase. Riverside County voters looked farther up the road last year, so to speak, and passed just such a measured sales-tax increase, so their transportation commission is ready to begin work on the freeway. The problem is that without corresponding improvements in Orange County, traffic could simply pile up when the car-pool lanes disappeared at the Orange County boundary.

Orange County officials are hoping Proposition 111 passes not because they would get funds for car-pool lanes on their side of the freeway but because it could make possible a bit of creative financing under which they could get their part of the freeway widened.

Approval of Proposition 111 could provide a kind of loan guarantee that would make it more palatable for Riverside County to advance funds to Orange County for its car-pool lanes. Riverside has suggested it might be willing to do that if Proposition 111 passes, and if the voters who approved their sales-tax increase agreed it was all right.

The state would have to be the financier in the end, because it would reimburse Riverside County after it had designated the project for funds. If that happened, it would take time for the project to move up on the priority list. But passage of Proposition 111 would give state officials some latitude to make a regional car-pool project work.

There are lots of “if’s” here. Projects from all over California would be competing for funds that would be available from its passage . Ideally, the installation of car-pool lanes along the Riverside Freeway should have been possible long before this. But versatile Proposition 111 has the potential to correct past oversights, and along the way make for good neighbors along a well-traveled commuter path.