Cities Can’t Get Where They Have to Go All by Themselves

Commuters heading to points north along Jamboree Road in Newport Beach each morning are greeted by a roadside sign outside a new housing complex. It wryly announces, “Future Freeway Ramp: Temporary Landscaping.” Up the road lies the Corona del Mar Freeway and its new lanes and approaches that are part of a new focal point of county congestion each morning. It’s the place where the San Joaquin Hills tollway brings people from the south to the work centers of Costa Mesa and beyond.

Those heading up Jamboree from the coastal cities may chuckle when they see the sign, which promises a ramp only a few feet from people’s bedrooms. However, its message speaks to a tangible concern. We are hearing a lot nowadays about the booming economy and the benefits of new housing and infrastructure. One byproduct is that the pressures of regional development are weighing heavily on city governments and neighborhoods.

These forces are creating tensions for local officials and activists to work out between themselves, sometimes in a testy atmosphere, without much promise of sufficient help from higher levels of government. The bureaucrats who plan regional transportation projects, and who even may threaten to withhold funding for pet projects if locals don’t play ball, are largely relieved of taking the heat.

The Jamboree sign is not too far from an intersection at the parallel MacArthur Boulevard, where Newport Beach residents successfully negotiated the realignment of Ford Road to handle increased traffic resulting from the tollway. The purpose was to keep a stream of cars from encroaching on people’s yards. That successful effort came up last week when the Irvine City Council chamber was filled with residents concerned about a similar pressure point: the proposed widening of Culver Drive near Turtle Rock.

The Irvine City Council was presented with what seemed to be a fairly clinical decision: whether a wider road to handle thousands of new cars a day coming from the tollway should provide a setback from nearby houses of 55 or 100 feet. After a staff report and considerable discussion and arguments on both sides, a divided council came down on the side of neighborhood activists. The result was a decision to approve the 100-foot setback.

In sorting out neighborhood passions through the buzzwords for noise levels, it perhaps is easy for the significance of the larger trend to escape undetected. A dramatic increase in traffic wasn’t one city’s doing. The opening of the tollway has brought new cars all around the region, and along the southerly portion of Culver Drive, a major artery in Irvine.

However much a local city may benefit from new arteries feeding it, Irvine clearly was being forced to address infrastructure demands generated by decisions made beyond its borders. Meanwhile, at the same time that traffic has been passing through a once-rural area to new jobs and expanded freeways, the growth and development of UC Irvine has produced its own pressure on local government.

It was clear Tuesday night that the council was searching for a route out of a dilemma as much as it was seeking a satisfactory road alignment. It was on the spot to find ways of meeting the requirements for a wider road without alienating two important but opposed constituencies, the residents and the university. It was under the gun as voters were questioning whether the quality of life they have known and enjoyed in neighborhoods will be sacrificed to meet regional transportation objectives.

For years, the idea of growth has been a welcoming prospect for Orange County’s future. What was clear in this discussion is that cities such as Irvine are now being presented with policy decisions that effectively corner officials on their commitment to maintaining an agreeable city environment.

The urgency of that question was on display when the council discussed its resolution. It anxiously sought ways of funding what the residents want and of negotiating with the university for a needed strip of right of way.

What is certain is that distant bureaucrats, county supervisors, large developers and major institutions have a continuing obligation to help cities find and finance answers to the demands created by countywide growth.