Avoiding Rocky Road to Better Freeways : * Planning, Some Patience and a Bit of Good Humor Should Smooth Widening Work

A series of ramp and lane closures that are part of the $1.6-billion Santa Ana Freeway widening project will surely test the patience of Orange County motorists in the new year.

Infrastructure repair is the inevitable price of continued growth and aging of Southern California’s expansive system of roads and freeways.

These same roads opened Orange County to new housing and jobs in recent decades. But one of the prices of success is that things do get older, or need to be widened to handle heavy volumes of traffic. One of the county’s worst interchanges, that of the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, will be a mess for two years. The northbound Santa Ana Freeway connector to the southbound Costa Mesa Freeway is being closed to make way for wider, longer and safer freeway-to-freeway transfers and special ramps reserved for car pools and buses.

To accomplish this work, Caltrans says it must close the ramp and as a result, motorists will be asked to take one of two alternative routes: Northbound Santa Ana Freeway traffic can exit at Red Hill Avenue, proceed south on Red Hill to Edinger Avenue and then take Edinger west to the Costa Mesa Freeway; or, after driving through the interchange, commuters can exit the Santa Ana Freeway at 1st Street, take 1st Street east to Tustin Avenue, travel north on Tustin to 17th Street, and then follow 17th Street east to the Costa Mesa Freeway.

This closure, and other freeway improvement projects around the county, need to be met with careful planning and some patience.

Some of these plans are already in place, which is good. For example, the interchange work takes place near the second anniversary of the state Department of Transportation’s “Orange Angels” program; teams of tow trucks patrol the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. to offer free assistance to motorists with flat tires, no fuel and other problems.

In Santa Ana, city and Caltrans officials have been discussing ways to meet residents’ complaints about heavy traffic on Santa Clara Avenue caused by a detour around the closed ramp from the eastbound Garden Grove Freeway to the southbound Santa Ana Freeway. Some good news: The construction of car-pool lanes on the Orange Freeway is ahead of schedule and may result in a May opening, which is almost a year early.

All these efforts, and a measure of good humor on the part of all of us who navigate these interchanges, will help smooth things along during a time of inevitable inconvenience.