Going ‘Round the Bend? Sorry, the Infamous Horseshoe Isn’t on Repair List

Drive the eastbound Garden Grove Freeway, follow the signs leading north to the Santa Ana or Orange freeways and you’ll hit the infamous horseshoe--a tight, 180-degree turn blemished with the scattered skid marks of unfortunate motorists who went too fast.

One of the myriad connectors forming the Orange Crush junction, the horseshoe is among the most traffic-choked stretches of pavement in the county. During rush hour, cars often back up 3 miles behind it on the Garden Grove Freeway, all the way to Beach Boulevard.

Despite the problem, there is no money set aside to improve the infamous horseshoe any time soon--even though many of the other connector roads making up the Orange Crush will be upgraded in the next few years as part of the Santa Ana Freeway widening project.

Officials at state Department of Transportation say the horseshoe was not included in the upcoming highway work because the Santa Ana Freeway project’s major focus all along has been to widen various bridge abutments to allow for more lanes.

Improvements to ease the snarl of traffic at the horseshoe would not prove very fruitful, they said, because the lanes to the north on the Santa Ana and Orange freeways cannot handle the extra traffic.

“If you’ve got two flat tires on a car and you fix one of them, it isn’t going to help. You have to fix them both,” said Barry Rabbitt, the Caltrans deputy director overseeing the Santa Ana Freeway work. “That was the problem” at the horseshoe.

Under long-term plans, the horseshoe will be fixed later in the decade when the Santa Ana Freeway is widened in Anaheim. As engineers envision it, a new overpass will be built and additional lanes added to smooth out problems presented by the horseshoe.

Motorists have suggested easing congestion at the junction simply by wielding a paintbrush. The horseshoe, they note, narrows from two lanes down to one right after the 180-degree curve. That bottleneck causes the daily queue of cars.

Why not simply restripe the section, using spare pavement at the side of the roadbed to form another lane so cars aren’t squeezed?

Caltrans officials said the idea has merit but ruled it out because the extra lane could only be striped for a few hundred yards before it would have to merge again. The restriping would simply move the bottleneck farther up the road, putting it in a spot to wreak even worse havoc than it does now, they said.

But transportation engineers at the agency haven’t given up completely on the idea. With a few modifications, they say, it could be put in place--and might even end up working well enough to eliminate the need for more costly construction.

Their plan calls for taking down a retaining wall and pouring a bit more pavement so the two lanes from the horseshoe could swing onto the Orange Freeway without dwindling down to a bottleneck.

Caltrans officials hope to get funding for that project sometime next year. But even if they get the money, any improvement will have to wait until 1993 for work to conclude on the La Veta Avenue overpass, which crosses over the lanes.

Car-pool lanes on the Orange Freeway will have to be finished to make room for heavier traffic that will be flowing off the horseshoe.