Pro-Auto Group Revs Up to Oppose Urban Rail Plan : Transportation: Faction says proposed $2-billion Irvine-to-Fullerton commuter train system won’t work, and prefers that money goes to highways. OCTA will hold a public hearing Monday.

Some freeway commuters dream of boarding a sleek, futuristic vehicle much like Disneyland’s monorail. But that vision of high-tech trains sliding past crammed roads holds no promise for Jack Mallinckrodt.

Mallinckrodt wants more streets, more ramps, more freeways. He wants to drive.

A semi-retired radio electronics engineer, Mallinckrodt will be joined by a cadre of county residents at Monday’s Orange County Transportation Authority board meeting.

Most will be from Drivers for Highway Safety, a vocal, pro-auto group. Their goal: ensuring that a proposed $2-billion urban rail line that might link Fullerton with Irvine never leaves the computer terminal, let alone the train station.

Mallinckrodt and other critics of the proposed 28-mile rail line are expected to dominate the informal public hearing, which is the public’s first open invitation to comment on the rail plan since the passage of Measure M in 1990.

The ballot measure targeted $340 million for urban rail, leaving officials to figure out how to raise the remaining cash and where to run the trains.

Mallinckrodt, who concedes that the federal government always allocates huge sums for mass transit, adds: “I realize that a dollar you can get from the feds is not the same as a dollar you can’t get. But I think it’s time to say maybe we shouldn’t accept this federal money at all, if it has to be used for something that doesn’t work.

“It’s an alternative to buses that provides transit for people who can’t afford an automobile,” Mallinckrodt says of urban rail service. “But neither one does anything significant anywhere for congestion relief. . . . A small fraction of what they’re proposing to spend on rail would pay for all the (highway) transportation we need.”

To be sure, some supporters of rail transit will speak, OCTA officials confidently predict. One of them is Dan Winton, a member of the Industrial League of Orange County, which has generally supported rail plans in the past, as long as studies show they attract riders and are only part of a broad mix of transportation projects.

“We support urban rail if the numbers prove out, and if it’s done in conjunction with other modes of transportation,” says Winton, a business and real estate attorney who chairs the Industrial League’s traffic committee. “We don’t see urban rail as the solution to all of our problems. . . . Basically, we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket.”

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Winton adds: “Until the automobile pays its fair share, not only of congestion costs but also of air-pollution costs, you’re not going to get a lot of people to use mass transit.”

But Winton probably will be outnumbered at Monday’s session, officials say, because rail critics are stronger in their beliefs and tend to act on them.

The OCTA board won’t vote on whether to go after federal funding and conduct a thorough study of all transit alternatives--including more buses--in the Fullerton-Irvine corridor until April 11. In the meantime, OCTA will release results of a countywide public opinion survey.

If OCTA ultimately votes to move ahead, the earliest passengers could board a monorail or other high-tech rail system would be the year 2002, officials estimate.

Although the actual decision to build is still a year or more away, both critics and advocates of the proposed rail system view the current debate as a turning point.

“For years, transit officials have been telling us we need rail, and they’ve got the public believing it,” Mallinckrodt said. “It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy . . . and this is the last chance to avoid going over the falls.”

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Mallinckrodt is among those who will argue Monday that urban rail is a boondoggle. For example, a recent study by professors at USC showed that Los Angeles County’s Blue Line light rail system has taken some automobiles off the road, but at a steep cost--$37,000 per year for each vehicle removed.

Governments could pay people a lot less in cash to junk their older, polluting cars, and buses are more cost-effective, most transportation experts and economists agree.

But rail advocates cite these arguments:

* Even though bus service is already scheduled to be improved somewhat under Measure M before intracounty, urban rail is ready, buses have an insurmountable, negative image and voters won’t raise taxes in the future to help fund a massive bus network.

* Buses get stuck in the same traffic as cars.

* Rail helps reduce the rate at which regional traffic congestion grows.

And all of this, rail backers say, is necessary to keep Southern California from stagnating economically and environmentally, compared to other regions that may already have good mass transit.

These arguments predate the Korean War.

But now, federal clean-air regulations overlay the whole debate. Federal policy views new roads as creating more congestion and smog.

Not rail.

On a regional basis, federal agencies require rail and bus projects to offset or balance the addition of new freeway lanes.

As a result, the billions of dollars spent on Los Angeles transit projects allow Orange County to keep improving its freeways, says Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, the regional planning authority. Orange is one of six counties in SCAG.

What really matters, says Monte Ward, a key OCTA staffer, is consumer choice.

“People generally don’t relate to construction or operating costs,” Ward observes. “They will look at rail and ask themselves, ‘Is it something I can use?’ and ‘Does it go where I need to go?’ And if they can answer those questions with a ‘Yes’ for themselves or somebody they know, then I think there will be public support.”

“I think the jury is still out,” he added.