Not All Are Aboard O.C. Rail Line Proposal : Transit: $1-billion plan links Fullerton to Irvine with elevated 23-mile line. Critics say they’re on wrong track.

New York has its storied subway, San Diego those spiffy red trolleys. But in Orange County, about the closest thing to an urban train line is the aging Disneyland monorail, which has whisked hordes of tourists on a serpentine path through the amusement park since 1959.

Now civic leaders are embarking on an ambitious, $1-billion effort to build an ultramodern, 23-mile rail system that will borrow a bit from Disney--and a lot from taxpayers.

Promoters envision sleek, high-tech trains that would ferry travelers from Irvine to Fullerton at up to 55 m.p.h. along elevated tracks above the traffic jams on city streets. A late-generation offshoot of the Magic Kingdom’s tried-and-tested monorail is among the trains being considered.

But even as politicians and planners look to Tomorrowland for their rail inspiration, a chorus of critics around the nation insist that the idea of an elevated commuter rail line in Orange County is best left in Fantasyland.

From Miami to Portland, Ore., and in half a dozen cities in between, commuter rail projects during recent decades have by and large failed dismally, with ridership figures falling far below predictions and costs ballooning beyond expectations.

Orange County could easily join the list, skeptics say, perhaps even becoming the biggest flop of its kind in the nation. Though a light rail line would make a nice, glossy package for promotional brochures to lure tourists and conventioneers, the system just won’t work, foes contend.

Backers say the intercity rail network, which they hope will eventually spread like well-watered ivy to all corners of the county, is needed to give commuters an alternative to the automobile. By providing drivers with an attractive option, urban rail could break their death-grip dependence on the car, which has cursed the county with traffic congestion and polluted skies.

Preliminary projections suggest the system’s initial phase could eventually capture as many as 70,000 riders a day, or about 3% of the more than 2 million motorists expected on the county’s highways within the next 20 years. Although the percentage seems small, transportation planners say it will slow the growth of freeway congestion even as commercial and residential development continues to sweep the region.

An elevated rail line could also help shape development patterns in Orange County well into the next century, altering the face of the region as office buildings and apartments sprout along the tracks, backers say.

“Traffic congestion on our roads and highways is beginning to affect our economy, to alter the ambience that lured people here,” said Costa Mesa Councilman Peter F. Buffa, a staunch supporter of urban rail for Orange County. “If we’re ever going to solve this problem, it’s got to be with a mix of the automobile, buses and true urban mass transit systems.”

Critics argue that with its sprawling suburbia and lack of a focal point for commerce, Orange County isn’t suited for rail transit. Each morning, commuters head in every imaginable direction to employment centers scattered around the region. No single rail line can fill the myriad needs of those million motorists, critics say.

In the meantime, local politicians who invariably push hardest for the projects turn a blind eye to the severe deficiencies of urban rail, foes lament. The reasons for such myopia are many and varied.

Lawmakers commonly suffer from the “ribbon-cutting syndrome,” the allure of championing a big-money rail project as a way to make their mark, critics say.

Meanwhile, the public and politicians alike share an abiding love of rail stemming from childhood days spent playing with toy trains. It’s called the “Lionel complex,” and Orange County certainly seems to be in its grip. A poll in 1990 showed that 81% of county residents believed that a rapid rail transit system would help relieve traffic congestion. Freeways garnered 62% support.

“People have a nostalgic fascination with rail,” said Martin Wachs, a UCLA professor of urban planning. “A bus is a plain old box on wheels. Monorail, on the other hand, is sleek and fast and goes whoosh when it passes by. But studies have demonstrated that rail is generally not cost effective. It costs more to transport people than do simpler alternatives like buses.”

Undeterred by such warnings, advocates of the Orange County urban rail project have barreled ahead, confident that their plans are an important step toward curing the traffic congestion that residents consistently rate as the No. 1 problem plaguing the region.

Monorails were first proposed as a solution as part of a special transportation tax that was defeated in 1984. Since the idea of an intercity system resurfaced in 1989, six cities--Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Irvine, Orange and Santa Ana--have united to spur development of the rail network. Several others, among them Brea and Huntington Beach, are clamoring to jump aboard.

Last month, the six-city group shifted into high gear, hiring an executive director to pilot the project. Though scores of details still need to be resolved, officials are already mulling possible names for the system. CenterRail perhaps, or SkyTrain.

Meanwhile, the Orange County Transportation Authority is expected to finance several studies that backers hope will serve as a reality check for both friends and foes of the project. The Transportation Authority already has a countywide rail study nearing completion that analyzes options both for commuter trains on the existing Amtrak line and urban rail service on new routes.

Although some skeptics say an Orange County rail network could lure at most 25,000 passengers a day once it goes into operation, the Transportation Authority’s study suggests that as many as 60,000 to 70,000 trips a day might be made by 2010. And county rail authorities suggest those numbers would increase dramatically as other legs of the system are added.

A final decision on the rail line is not expected until early 1993, with construction beginning the following year. Under the most favorable scenario, the first passengers might be boarding by the end of the decade.

Just how large an infusion of public cash will be necessary to build and operate the system remains to be seen.

Promoters of the rail line hope to tap $375 million from Measure M, the half-cent sales tax increase imposed by Orange County voters last November. Another $125 million is being counted on from Irvine’s proceeds from Proposition 116, the state rail-bond measure approved a year ago. Officials may also try to tap other state transit funds.

About $200 million is expected from the private sector. Promoters of the urban rail project say they might require that the company building the system drum up private investment capital. In exchange, investors would reap returns from advertising and concessions around the stations.

Private enterprise could also step in for operating costs, promoters suggest.

Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young, who began championing a central county monorail system two years ago, says a symbiotic relationship could be created between urban rail and a proposed elevated tollway down the Santa Ana River bed. Revenue from the private tollway, which wouldn’t be built until 1997 at the earliest, could be tapped to operate the urban rail. In exchange, the rail network would be used to compensate for negative air quality effects of tollway traffic, a major issue for Southland smog regulators.

Costa Mesa’s Buffa, meanwhile, said developers along the line could also be hit up for operating money. In exchange for underwriting the day-to-day expenses of running the rail line, developers might be allowed to build bigger projects than authorities might otherwise permit under the region’s air quality laws. He hopes more than 50% of the operating costs come from private enterprise.

“Those of us involved in this project are going to be trying to push the private sector to pick up as much as possible, and the private sector will push back,” Buffa said. “The question is where will we meet a balance that makes sense in terms of good public policy.”

But first the project must overcome a serious obstacle: The public transit industry has a haunting track record of consistently overestimating potential ridership and badly understating construction and operating costs.

In Miami, ridership is 85% smaller than forecast when the project was approved, and construction costs were one-third higher than expected. Portland’s light rail line cost 55% more than expected, but the number of riders is lagging by 54%. Higher-than-expected costs and lower-than-anticipated ridership has also plagued rail systems in Washington, Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit and Sacramento.

Urban planners and economists predict the same sort of fallacious forecasting will take hold in Orange County. The result, they contend, would be the approval of a rail line that might not prove effective for at least another generation--if ever.

“The most important thing for people to keep in mind is that the folks doing the patronage forecasts for these types of rail lines are lying,” argued Charles Lave, economics department chairman at UC Irvine. “You’ve got a group of consulting companies running around the country that have learned there’s a market niche for firms that are willing to lie about patronage.”

Santa Ana’s Young is the first to admit that when it comes to the forecasting business, public transit and the politicians who promote it have a credibility problem.

Young has experienced prognostication pitfalls himself. Little more than a year ago, he was projecting that an Orange County monorail line could be financed and built by private enterprise. Since then he has changed his tune and admitted that public funds are necessary.

“We don’t intend to take the big-lie approach,” Young said. “Honesty is going to be an issue, and we know it.”

In that spirit, Young and other champions of the system are beginning to admit that a monorail probably will not make a serious dent in today’s traffic mess. Most car-bound commuters, after all, won’t just abandon old habits overnight.

At best, they acknowledge, rail will simply slow the pace of traffic growth and act as a safety valve to allow additional, higher-density development in the face of Southern California’s restrictive air quality regulations.

For Young, that makes particular sense in Santa Ana, where the decade-long quest to overhaul the sagging cityscape will depend on luring high-quality commercial and office development.

“How are we going to revitalize Santa Ana without a transit system?” Young asks. “That’s the bottom line.”

Those who stand to benefit most from the proposed rail network are developers, in particular speculators who can assemble several small lots along the route into bigger parcels that will sprout new retail and residential complexes.

That sort of high-rise retrofit has occurred along the year-old Blue Line in downtown Long Beach. Decaying apartment buildings and bungalow-style houses are being torn down to make room for pricier condominiums to line the tracks near the light-rail line leading to Los Angeles.

A similar shift could happen in Orange County. A 1989 study by the Houston-based Joint Center for Marketing Research concluded that transit stations can serve as “magnets” for redevelopment, with surrounding land increasing in price by as much as 300%.

But any real estate bonanza has limits. The same study concluded that commercial land 1,000 feet from a station sometimes declines in value. And while high-density residential units near a new rail line tend to increase in price, single-family houses in the surrounding suburbs generally decrease in value, the researchers noted.

Other pitfalls loom.

Consider the situation in the Bay Area city of Walnut Creek. After a Bay Area Rapid Transit station was built there, so many new office buildings appeared that traffic is much worse now than before BART. Only 2% of the office workers in the area use the rail system. There’s more smog, not less.

But Walnut Creek is a worst-case scenario. The city’s transit station mainly feeds commuters bound for San Francisco and Oakland onto BART. The office buildings surrounding the station are stocked mostly by workers living nearby, and nearly all of those are forced to use their cars to get to work because of a dearth of local buses.

Forewarned, Orange County rail promoters say they will work hard to avoid another Walnut Creek while adopting new zoning laws to encourage high-density development along rail corridors.

Even without urban rail, local planners predict a heady growth rate for Orange County over the next two decades. By 2010, the county is expected to be home to about 3 million residents and provide nearly 2 million jobs--a 25% gain in population and a 55% boost in employment compared to 1990 estimates. As a result of all the new people and their cars, rush hour traffic speeds will drop to 19 m.p.h. on existing freeways, transportation officials predict.

Hence, county planners suggest that most of that growth can be focused along transit corridors, bolstering the chances an urban rail line will succeed. They intend to insist that high-rise condo projects and office towers be clustered near rail lines.

“The rail system won’t work by itself,” says Bruce Nestande, former chairman of the California Transportation Commission and vice president of Costa Mesa-based Arnel Development Co. “I support the Orange County project, but with the realization that you’ve got to make it work. And the way you make it work is by creating the kinds of densities that many people in Orange County have not seen here before.”

Such an ambitious retooling of Orange County’s urban landscape, however, will be easier debated than done, rail critics say. They note that residents often rebel when plans surface for high-rise housing and offices near their neighborhoods.

“Do you think a homeowners group is going to support a proposal to build 12- and 15-story apartment buildings right next to their neighborhood?” questioned Wachs of UCLA. “The fact that the rail supporters are proposing the tracks go through existing neighborhoods probably will result in even more opposition to this project.”

UC Irvine’s Lave, meanwhile, said there is no data suggesting that establishment of an urban rail line will prompt fundamental changes in the shape of a city. And at best, the face lift would be glacially slow.

Critics say Orange County needs to look at alternatives other than rail to cure its transportation woes. Wachs and others see the bus as a far more flexible and cost-effective solution. A bus, after all, is not confined to tracks. They also note that the county is already building a network of car-pool lanes that will serve effectively as special transit-ways for express buses.

Many experts also suggest that lawmakers take a quantum leap and impose Draconian measures such as “congestion fees” during peak hours on the freeway and shift laws so employers will be more apt to charge commuting workers for parking in company lots. By charging those “true costs” for driving a car, motorists would be more apt to switch to mass transit or ride-sharing.

But urban rail proponents in Orange County say an intercity train is vitally needed as one part of the wide-ranging effort to keep the region from grinding to a halt. People need choices, they say.

“Right now you have only one option--sit on the (freeway) and stew,” said Stanley T. Oftelie, the Transportation Authority’s chief executive officer. “With rail transit you can decide whether you still want to be stuck on I-5 or leave your car somewhere and try something different.”

While an urban rail network certainly can’t run everywhere, promoters hope the 23-mile main line will feed passengers to slow-speed “people movers” that could circulate crowds around business centers. Rail circulators are being eyed for the Irvine Business Center near John Wayne Airport and the Irvine Spectrum, Santa Ana’s Civic Center and Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle office complex fanning out from Anaheim Stadium.

Meanwhile, jitney bus fleets could be used to collect commuters near their homes and deposit them at rail stations for the trip to work.

Santa Ana’s Young and others argue that there’s little choice but to push forward, despite the cost.

As they see it, the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s already strict regulations will be made even tougher in the next few years, giving elected officials no choice but to build rail systems as a way to offset the traffic impacts of development.

To that end, Southland officials began exploring ways a few years ago to achieve federally mandated air quality standards while preserving mobility in the region to sustain its economic vitality. The Southern California Assn. of Governments, a six-county planning agency, ran computer models to see which transportation solutions would work.

Although some critics quarrel with the results, the modeling showed that rolling out more freeways, even with car-pool lanes, wouldn’t do the trick, nor would adding lots of new buses.

“It turns out that if you have any hope of succeeding at all, you need a mixture of all these things, including rail transit,” said Pat Layden, AQMD’s deputy executive officer for planning and rules.

Said Costa Mesa’s Buffa: “I think there’s a real innate sense among both public officials and residents that it’s worth trying. No one is going out on a limb and saying this is the solution. But most are saying, ‘Give it a try.’ We’ve got to do something.”

Orange County Urban Rail

Is it Orange County’s rail destiny or a billion-dollar boondoggle? Critics say a high-tech elevated rail line would prove costly and fail to attract riders, but promoters contend the system is the region’s best hope for both clean air and mobility. Authorities estimate the 23-mile, $1-billion system could attract 70,000 commuters a day. Although the general route has been hammered out, officials have yet to select the type of train that will ply the tracks. Monorails and steel-wheeled vehicles are the leading contenders. Steel Wheel

More than a half dozen firms supply these types of cars, which ride like traditional trains with steel wheels sitting atop steel rails. Costs $40 to $50 million a mile for elevated track.

Advantages: Shelf-ready, mass-produced vehicles from a variety of manufacturers with a long record of commercial service in cities around the world.

Disadvantages: Cars tend to look boxy and uninviting. Noisier than monorails. Concrete pilings and elevated track bed are much wider and block more of sky.

Elevated Station

Towering two stories above the street, stations could be built in the center median of existing thoroughfares or as part of new office and commercial developments along the route, with tracks swinging right into the lobby of some new buildings. Monorail

Principal supplier is Bombardier Corp. of Canada, the firm that built the Disney World system. Needle-nosed train with rubber wheels in undercarriage straddles a concrete beam elevated above surface streets. Costs $30 million to $40 million per mile.

Advantages: Light weight of both cars and track. Narrow track is less an eyesore.

Disadvantages: With only one supplier, no price competition for purchase of cars. Also, trains and cars cannot be interchanged with other rail systems. No history of commercial service outside of amusement parks.

The Money

$375 million - Measure M

$300 million - Other

$200 million - Private sector.

$125 million - State bonds

Total - $1 billion

The Routes

The main line stretches from Irvine to the Fullerton Amtrak station. Passengers would be whisked at speeds up to 55 m.p.h., making the 23-mile trip in about 50 minutes. More than 20 potential station sites have been identified (including several at existing Amtrak stops), but the final decision will be left to politicians and developers. Slower-speed circulator trains are proposed in heavily congested areas such as the Santa Ana Civic Center, Anaheim Convention Center and the Irvine Business Complex.

Source: Orange County Transportation Authority and rail industry sources.