When No Change Is a Major Improvement : Transportation: Car-poolers won’t have to fight traffic when switching freeways, thanks to a new bridge.

Sixty feet above the Santa Ana Freeway, as traffic whizzed beneath them, a group of freeway builders and young future engineers met Friday morning to place their handprints and initials in the wet cement of a newly wrought masterpiece.

The engineering feat is the nation’s first bridge directly connecting the car-pool lanes of two freeways.

When the 1.4-mile bridge opens in August, car-poolers headed north on the Costa Mesa Freeway can enter the northbound car-pool lane on the Santa Ana Freeway directly. And drivers going south on the Santa Ana Freeway can take the bridge to the Costa Mesa.

Car-poolers no longer will need to weave through four lanes of traffic to leave one freeway and get on the other, then maneuver through more lanes of traffic to reach the car-pool lane.

Also, the transitway is expected to help express buses stay on schedule even during peak traffic periods.

“It is a very simple concept,” said Brent Felker, Caltrans director in Orange County. “If you look at people’s frustrations with car-pool lanes, a lot of it has to do with having to cross-mix traffic.”

Caltrans officials described transitways as the “way of the future,” certain to be adopted throughout the nation as a remedy for unclogging bottlenecks at freeway intersections.

Two other car-pool transitways that will link the Orange and Santa Ana freeways in Santa Ana and the Harbor and Century freeways in Los Angeles are scheduled to open in 1996.

Orange County’s first transitway, which straddles the border between Tustin and Santa Ana, is the centerpiece of a $197-million reconstruction project underway on the Santa Ana Freeway/Costa Mesa Freeway interchange, which is the ninth busiest in the nation.

Within two years, pending completion of other improvements on the Santa Ana Freeway, the transitway is expected to carry about 500 cars and buses an hour during rush hours.

It is a joint project of the Orange County Transportation Authority, which provided $24 million in funding, and state Department of Transportation, which supervised the design and construction.

Although the opening of the transitway is still months away, Caltrans and OCTA officials Friday treated four students with an interest in transportation and engineering careers to a tour of the nearly completed structure, which is considered on the cutting edge of traffic engineering.

Don Juge, the project’s head engineer, proudly described the gracefully curving two-lane bridge, which has been under construction since 1990, with a litany of statistics. He noted that it contains 4,000 tons of steel, more than 55,000 tons of concrete and a foundation braced with 1,300, 80-foot pilings driven into the ground.

“It looks very impressive,” said Diane Nguyen, 22, who just received a master’s degree in urban and regional planning at UC Irvine and has worked as an intern at OCTA. “I like the symbolism of passing a legacy to another generation.”

The students, including two recent Santa Ana High School graduates, and OCTA and Caltrans officials knelt in the middle of the bridge and pushed their hands into soft concrete. When the impressions dry, a Caltrans spokeswoman said, the block of cement will be cut out and placed in a time capsule that will be put in a hollow beneath the transitway.

“How many times do you get to stand in the middle of a freeway and put your hand in cement where cars will be driving,” marveled Kevin Taylor, 18, a Santa Ana High School graduate who will be going to Rancho Santiago Community College in the fall.

The youth said said that for the past four years he has worked weekends and summers for a construction company, and Friday’s tour reinforced his desire to make building his career.

“Construction is the greatest thing in the world for me,” he said, because of “the thrill of seeing something you actually created. You can walk by and say, ‘Look, I built that.’ ”

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Smooth Switch When the nation’s first elevated car- pool transitway opens in Orange County in August, it will allow direct freeway-to- freeway transition without leaving the car-pool lane.

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Transitway Trivia Connection: Northbound Costa Mesa Freeway to northbound Santa Ana Freeway; southbound Santa Ana Freeway to southbound Costa Mesa Freeway. Cost: $24 million Length: 1.4 miles Height: 60 feet at peak over Santa Ana Freeway. Width: 50 feet. Materials: 55,000 tons concrete, 4,000 tons steel. Spans: 52, averaging 120 feet long. Foundation: 1,300 pilings more than 80 feet deep. Support: 55 concrete columns, four outrigger supports. Seismic reinforcement: More than $1 million in steel added. Source: Caltrans