Corona Tries to Break Bottleneck Nightmare : Commute: A neighborhood’s drivers spend up to 40 minutes just trying to get on the Riverside Freeway. Droves of commuters think their street is a shortcut.

If many commuters and traffic planners had their way, a street that links housing tracts with the Riverside Freeway will have car-pool lanes, a four-lane overpass and an electronically metered freeway on-ramp.

Sound like too much for the usually quiet, two-lane Green River Drive? Not to the neighborhood’s residents, who spend 20 to 40 minutes trying to get on the freeway when the congested street is backed up for about a mile at commute time.

For years, morning commuters have used streets all over Corona as shortcuts, hoping to avoid congestion on the Riverside Freeway. Much to their dismay, their plans are foiled at Green River Drive. The road, which leads to a one-lane Riverside Freeway overpass and on-ramp, is the farthest they can get and the last exit before the Orange County line.

For planners, the snarl has been especially frustrating.

“It is a nagging problem we haven’t been able to easily get everyone to buy into,” said Frank Sherkow, director of transportation for Riverside County. “Green River has been a lot more difficult because of the technical aspects, the great volume of traffic and the ongoing growth in that area. You’ve still got acres of undeveloped land out there.”

Perhaps angered most are the neighborhoods of Sierra del Oro, a master-planned community of 3,200 homes built in 1985.

“The people of Sierra del Oro have been shocked,” said Chris Perez, who lives in the west Corona community. “It was beyond their comprehension how bad it was. Here’s all these people from Orange County getting a great deal on their house, and they’re not being told what it’s like.”

Perez is the chairman of the 2-year-old Citizens of Corona for Traffic Solutions, which advises city officials on how to reduce congestion all over the city. At the top of their list have been the problems at Green River Drive.

“Polls have been taken of what was the No. 1 problem, and the residents have said traffic,” Perez said. “It was ahead of crime, ahead of drugs, ahead of gangs. That’s unusual for a city.”

The traffic is so bad that a new resident who lives in a hilly neighborhood off of Green River Drive is planning to move away.

“It’s gorgeous out here, it’s absolutely gorgeous,” said Michelle Needham, who commutes from Sierra del Oro to her teaching job at Esperanza High School in Anaheim. “If I could just get down the hill in the morning, I’d stay.”

Even so, city officials say, they get many of the complaints for something that is not their fault, for they had no idea that people from all over the county would be using Sierra del Oro streets. During the morning commute, estimates show, 1,300 cars an hour try to get on the Riverside Freeway from Green River Drive, most of them from the direction of Sierra del Oro.

“I would say that 50% to 80% of the people who use the street in the morning are (commuters) from outside of Corona,” Corona City Manager Bill Garrett said. “This is most definitely a regional problem and not a local problem.”

The city has had mixed results in trying to reduce the traffic problems. Several years ago, stop signs were placed on Ontario Avenue, which leads from Interstate 15 to Green River Drive. The move was a bid to frustrate those taking shortcuts, but the signs were just as annoying to residents and eventually abandoned, Garrett said.

City officials said they were more successful at curbing traffic when they blocked off San Ramon Road in the spring of 1990. Wise commuters would take this short street to avoid much of the freeway wait on Green River Drive, angering homeowners who complained of speeding motorists. The closure has kept commuters out.

“People have criticized us by saying, ‘Why in the world did you plan a street that way in the first place?’ ” Garrett said. “We didn’t expect regional commuters to be using our roads. Now we’ve learned. At the time, we didn’t have that experience.”

The problems with Green River Drive have led another community group, Citizens Acting for Responsible Growth and Order, to oppose plans for a 92,000-square-foot shopping center at Green River and Dominguez Ranch Road, said the group’s leader, Adrienne Potter.

Foes said the Sierra del Oro Promenade, which would include a cinema multiplex, would add traffic dangers and noise. They also fear that it will create another possible shortcut for commuters. The development will be considered Wednesday by the Corona City Council.

The problems along Green River Drive have become Potter’s primary rallying cry for traffic relief. In one lobbying attempt, the group made a videotape of the traffic on Green River Drive and added background funeral music. And ironically, group members collect signatures for their petitions by canvassing cars mired in morning traffic on Green River Drive.

“They loved it,” Potter said about the stranded drivers. “They were bored to tears sitting there.”

But help appears to be on the horizon. Last month, county transportation planners outlined a short-term solution to the Green River problems that calls for adding a temporary third lane, to be used for car- and van-poolers. The lane would start at Dominguez Ranch Road and end at the overpass. There, a traffic officer would give first preference to car-poolers waiting to get on the freeway.

“Yes, it is unusual,” said Sherkow, the county transportation chief. “But it is something that is doable now at a relatively low cost. . . . At least people in car and van pools will have a much easier time getting on at Green River.”

Riverside County officials would like to open the third lane this fall, to coincide with new ramp metering and restriping at Green River, Sherkow said. Until then, they are seeking opinions from city officials and citizen groups, along with the state Department of Transportation.

In the meantime, the county Transportation Commission has hired a consultant to study permanent solutions to the traffic tie-ups. Among them are plans to extend and widen the westbound Riverside Freeway on-ramp so it will start at three lanes, merge to two and end at one lane when it reaches the freeway. In this way, much of the traffic on Green River could be diffused to the on-ramp.

That plan could coincide with other options, such as widening the Green River bridge over the freeway to five lanes to include space for double left-turn lanes leading to the on-ramp. In another variation, another car-pool lane would be added on Green River from Dominguez Ranch Road to the freeway. Planners said that these options are preliminary and that their more pressing concern will be how to pay for any of the solutions. At the low end, if only signals are added, it would cost $200,000. More elaborate widening options will cost $3 million to $4 million.

But planners point out that until car-pool lanes are completed on the Riverside Freeway, the problem will not be solved. The new freeway lanes through Corona are expected to be completed in 1993, and a schedule for Orange County’s part of the widening is incomplete.

Even if any of the proposals are carried out, some say what will still be needed is an east-west route between Orange and Riverside counties that would get people away from Corona altogether.

“It will help,” Perez said about the decision to ease the Green River bottleneck.