COSTA MESA : Student Uses His Head in Road Protest

A 25-year-old college student put his head into a bicycle lock and attached it to the front gate of the Transportation Corridor Agencies offices on Monday to protest construction of three proposed toll roads in eastern and southern Orange County.

Police were called by employees arriving for work about 7:45 a.m., but Craig Beneville was left attached to the fence in the rain for another two hours because agency officials declined to press trespassing charges. About 9:30 a.m., Beneville unlocked himself and left.

The “decision was to kind of let things pass for a while and see what happens,” said Mike Stockstill, a spokesman for the transportation agency.

About a dozen other protesters from UC Irvine and from the Orange County chapter of Earth First! picketed outside the corridor agency’s office while Beneville blocked the front entrance.

A second gate to the agency’s office was also sealed with another bicycle lock, and glue was squirted into the latches of several more entrances. Beneville said in an interview that he didn’t know anything about the glue, and he declined to comment on the lock placed on the second gate.

Stockstill said the glue caused less than $1,000 damage to the locks.

Beneville, a political science student at UCI and founding member of the campus’s Student Activists for the Environment, said about his protest: “They will cut up the last wild areas of Orange County.”

Beneville said he protested the proposed San Joaquin Hills corridor Saturday in the Laguna Beach rally that attracted about 2,000. But he said he had never broken the law as a form of protest.

“To me, the gravity of the situation demands it, and I would do it again,” he said. “It blows my mind that they can get away with saying (the toll roads will) relieve congestion when their own studies show that they’ll increase the overall speed by 2 m.p.h. at most and up to 70% of the traffic will be traffic to new developments that the toll roads themselves will produce,” Beneville said.

Corridor agency studies estimate that about 50% of the traffic using the toll roads will be generated by development that has occurred since 1986, agency spokeswoman Lisa Telles said. The 2-m.p.h. increase in speeds the toll roads would bring, actually 1.6 m.p.h, was calculated by figuring the speed of cars on all roads in Orange County, not just the freeways and highways, Telles said.