Toll Lanes on 91 Freeway May Be Sold : Transportation: Private firm offered chance to buy 10-mile segment and charge motorists.

The Orange County Transportation Authority would build car-pool lanes on a 10-mile stretch of the Riverside Freeway and then give a private firm the option to buy the lanes and charge tolls under a new proposal outlined Monday.

If the firm buys the new lanes, it would clear the way for commuter toll lanes all the way from the Riverside County line west to the Orange Freeway.

The firm, California Private Transportation Co. of Irvine, is already raising $100 million in private money to build and operate toll lanes along the median strip from the Riverside line west to the Costa Mesa Freeway.

As proposed, OCTA would use Measure M and state funds to add one car-pool lane in each direction to another 10-mile segment between the Costa Mesa and Orange freeways and then offer to sell them to CPTC before they open to traffic. Officials now hope the entire 20-mile stretch will be open in two years.

Why would OCTA officials want to turn brand-new public car-pool lanes into privately owned toll lanes? Officials say this would allow taxpayers to recover the cost of building the lanes and to then spend the money on other road projects.

As part of the agreement to come before the OCTA board next Monday, the private firm would reimburse the transportation agency $5 million that it has already spent on advance planning and environmental work for widening the Riverside Freeway.

“What’s nice about this is we get our $5 million back and both segments will be built simultaneously,” said Stan Oftelie, OCTA’s chief executive officer. “Construction could start on California’s first toll lanes in modern times by Labor Day.”

Gerald Pfeffer, manager of CPTC, was more cautious because he hasn’t seen the final documents yet. But he said he expects an agreement to be presented to the county transportation authority board on Monday.

“All I can say is that we’re still working with the OCTA staff to hammer out the final details . . . and we’re very optimistic we’re going to reach an agreement that’s satisfactory to all concerned,” Pfeffer said.

The CPTC portion of the Riverside Freeway project not only promises traffic relief in one of the county’s most severely congested corridors but will be the first true test in the United States of “congestion pricing,” the concept of charging motorists more to use a highway during peak hours.

CPTC, a limited partnership between CRSS Inc., a major design and engineering firm, and a French toll-road company, expects one-way tolls of $2 during peak hours, $1 in off-peak periods, and free access to car pools of three or more people.

In California, traditional car-pool lanes are reserved for vehicles carrying two or more. If CPTC decides not to buy the segment west of the Costa Mesa Freeway from OCTA, the car-pool lanes there will be open to vehicles carrying two or more people.

Caltrans awarded CPTC the franchise to build a tollway on the Riverside Freeway two years ago after the Legislature agreed to allow four private toll-road experiments in California. Two were designated in Orange County. One was the Riverside Freeway project; the other is a planned extension of the Orange Freeway--as a toll road--on stilts in the middle of the Santa Ana River between Anaheim Stadium and John Wayne Airport. That project is still undergoing feasibility studies.