Finally, an Orange County Roadway That Drives You Sane

Want to take a trip in a time capsule?

Want to get on an Orange County highway and be able to hear yourself think? Or look at pleasing scenery without the fear of being tailgated, rear-ended, sideswiped, broadsided or whatever else your fellow motorists can think of?

Think it’s impossible?

Not so.

Merely get on the San Joaquin Hills tollway, that billion-dollar monument to traffic relief (and future development), and forget about your cars and woes.

I’ve traveled the tollway three times, all on weekdays. Once was at 3 in the afternoon and the other two times at what I thought would be rush hour at 5:30 p.m.

I haven’t been that alone on a highway since looking for a motel at midnight on vacation. It’s so quiet on the San Joaquin you can actually hear them tearing up more of Laguna Canyon to extend it. Lewis and Clark had more company than I did.

I’m tempted to want to be the first to call the tollway an unmitigated failure, but the truth is, it’s too early. Only part of the road has opened, and its northern end point at Laguna Canyon Road is convenient to a limited number of people. Eventually, the tollway will connect Interstate 5 in South County to the Corona del Mar Freeway in Newport Beach.

So, no, it would be foolish to say the completed road won’t be popular. But in a county where cars sniff out highways like dogs on chow, you can say at this point that the tollway may be Orange County’s best-kept secret.

Which is what makes driving on it a near-surreal experience.

Wander onto it at midday and you could easily think that Goldfinger has once again dropped nerve gas on the rest of the population. Let’s just say you’ll be alone with your thoughts.

Paul Glaab, spokesman for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, disputes my ghost-town image of the tollway but concedes that people are still “in the process of discovering” the tollway. He notes that its opening on July 24 was intentionally played down, because only a partial stretch was opening and the TCA wanted to temper people’s expectations.

The rest of the corridor will open Nov. 21, Glaab said, and there will be more fanfare then. When the entire 15-mile stretch is opened, Glaab said, the agency expects the tollway to be “very well received.”

Although I could practically hear crickets chirping by the roadside, Glaab said the tollway booths now handle 10,000 “transactions” a day. That’s up from more than 6,000 when it opened three months ago, he said.

“Quite honestly, we’re incredibly impressed with the response,” he said. “We could have gone out and banged the drum and killed ourselves with our own success.” Instead, he said, the agency “managed the expectations and managed the use of the corridor,” since it was going to be another four months until the final stretch was opened.

Glaab’s figures indicate the tollway is averaging more than 400 cars an hour each day. Assuming that no one is on it during the wee hours, it must be doing pretty good business during the daylight. But not when I traveled it.

On my rush-hour trips, after escaping bumper-to-bumper traffic on the southbound 405 and Laguna Canyon Road, I pretty much had the tollway to myself. I was one of four cars at the booth. Once I got onto the tollway and peaked at 55 mph, I was soon alone as the other three cars whizzed past.

Whether looking east toward the Santa Ana Mountains or west toward Laguna Canyon, the drive is a picturesque, relaxing cruise.

No more than a half-dozen cars passed me by the time I finished the six-mile southbound trip. If the paucity of traffic isn’t shocking enough, the absence of noise is. Driving the tollway and then merging onto I-5 was like emerging from a phone booth into a train station.

On my northbound return trip, a single car joined me at the tollway entrance. For most of the ride, we were the only two vehicles in sight. At journey’s end, I greeted the man in the tollbooth and asked, “Doesn’t anybody drive this thing?”

“Sure,” he said, with a smile. “Look behind you.”

By golly, three cars were approaching.

I guess my point is, if you want to know what it was like to drive in Orange County before everyone discovered the place, the San Joaquin is Memory Lane. Your Own Private Highway.

But if Glaab is right about the appeal of the completed route come next month, time is running out.

Is there any doubt, I asked Glaab, that the tollway will lure drivers?

“We’re way past that,” he said, “and here’s why: Take the 405 and the 5. That’s 45 minutes to 90 minutes from South County to mid-county. Ours will be 15 minutes. We’re very excited about that. It’s state of the art. Yes, there is a toll. However, we recognize that time is money, and it becomes a choice issue.”

If Glaab is right, the “good old days” on the San Joaquin are nearing an end.

We may have only a month to go before the future looms in our rear-view mirror.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.