Countywide : Tollway to Add Lane for Cash Customers

Confronted by long lines of anxious commuters, Foothill tollway officials say they will add another lane for cash-paying customers to the toll plaza at Portola Parkway near Irvine.

The bunching of cars at the tollbooth started on Monday, the first day that tolls were collected on the first toll road to open in California since they were banned in 1929.

The first, 3.2-mile segment of the 30-mile tollway opened on Oct. 16 but was toll-free during a two-week, get-acquainted period.

Officials said they believe that too few people are using the tollway’s FasTrak system to breeze through the lane reserved for them. The system allows motorists equipped with dashboard-mounted transponders and devices resembling credit cards to pass through the tollbooth without stopping. Tolls are then billed to the cardholders’ prepaid accounts.

During a meeting of the Foothill tollway operations committee in Costa Mesa on Wednesday, officials from Lockheed IMS, the firm that installed and operates the toll-collection system, and the Transportation Corridor Agencies discussed the problem.

Officials said it was clear that better use of the FasTrak system wouldn’t solve the immediate problem, even though daily traffic volumes are only about 45% of the roughly 12,000 vehicles per day experienced during the two weeks when no tolls were collected.

“It’s not only what’s going on now that we’re concerned about, but when the road is extended, we expect much higher volumes, and that indicates a need for the extra lane,” tollway spokesman Mike Stockstill said.

Stockstill said it would take four to six weeks to install a second lane with an automatic coin machine for cash-paying customers. A canopy also may be installed. Total cost, he said, would be slightly more than $1 million.

Use of FasTrak has reached about 100 vehicles per day, Stockstill said. About 268 of the FasTrak kits have been delivered to motorists, with a total of 376 applications received so far.

Stockstill said the operations committee will recommend to the tollway board of directors next week that motorists receive coupons for free replacement batteries for the dashboard-mounted transponders, since they have to be replaced every six months or so.

Also, Stockstill said engineers are working on a new model of transponder that will be smaller but that will still be mounted on vehicle dashboards.

The tollway currently extends from Portola Parkway near Lake Forest to Portola Parkway near Irvine. Eventually, the road will extend from the Irvine Lake area to Interstate 5 near San Clemente.