Irvine Metrolink Users Eager to Leave Cars Behind, but Where?

The mad scramble begins about 6:50 a.m. as cars zigzag through the parking lot of the Irvine Transportation Center, where parking spaces and patience are in short supply. On a bad weather day, don’t even bother showing up after 6:45 a.m.

The most popular Metrolink station in Orange County is grappling with a problem of success and cramped quarters, and--after an aborted attempt to charge for parking--recovering from a minor customer revolt.

Officials say they are unsure how they can get commuters to leave their cars behind if they can’t offer them a place to park. Commuters have complained for more than a year that parking is too tight and adds to the list of hassles that deter drivers from becoming regular riders.

“We don’t have the growth potential we need there,” Irvine Mayor Christina L. Shea said. “It’s a good problem to have, but we need to find some answers. In the next six months we’ll have to come up with some short-term and long-term solutions.”

Metrolink ridership is growing steadily, and more trains are being added in October. New stations planned for Mission Viejo and Tustin will siphon off a large percentage of the Irvine ridership, but those train stops probably won’t open until 2000. And, even then, the Irvine site serves an area expected to see major growth in the upcoming decades.

The long-term options are building a new lot or even a major parking structure, Shea said. Within the next six months, the city hopes to fashion a stopgap solution, perhaps finding a way to fund a free valet or shuttle service, Shea said.

One safe bet: Any new plan will not involve a parking fee.

“We tried that, and people were tweaked that they had to pay,” Shea said. “It did not go over well.”

In March, one-fifth of the parking lot was blocked off for valet-style parking, which allowed attendants to briefly cram 50 to 60 extra cars into the 537-space lot. But riders balked at the $2 fee and a flood of letters and calls turned a planned three-month experiment into a three-week bomb.

“Obviously, that failed,” said station manager Farideh Lyons. “People in Orange County are not used to paying for parking. This is not L.A. We needed to try something. We need more parking. This is something that is not going to go away.”

“It was a cockamamie idea from the get-go,” said Bruce Rawding, a Mission Viejo resident and a daily Metrolink rider for four years. “It was very unpopular and made things worse.”

That was a common opinion on a recent Friday among riders sipping coffee and lugging briefcases in the breezeway of the Barranca Parkway facility. Some believed the parking fee was ill-timed because it came amid proposals to raise the Metrolink fare (which were approved in May), others thought the charge at the city-owned lot was more about profit than parking.

“Bad idea,” said David Nakanishi, a banker from Mission Viejo. “I was glad to see it go.”

In a way, the parking fee may have helped ease parking--ridership from the station has dropped 5% in the wake of the short-lived experiment. But Lyons said that is partly a product of the seasonal fluctuations in rider habits, and won’t last.

In fact, Metrolink ridership is projected to grow 16% in the next year.

The 5-year-old Metrolink system, one of the fastest-growing urban rails in the nation, now has about 27,000 riders per day, about 5,100 of them on the Orange County line.

The most popular of the 10 stations on that line is Irvine, with 21% of the riders, according Peter G. Hidalgo, spokesman for the rail system.

A seven-day study done one year ago this week logged 7,161 Metrolink riders using the station, along with 2,907 Amtrak passengers. The average weekday total during the study was 1,822 riders for the two rail systems, according to the survey by Schiermeyer Consulting Services.

While Shea said building a parking structure or acquiring a nearby lot is needed to handle the Irvine station overflow and future growth, Lyons said the two new Metrolink sites opening further south will greatly reduce the Irvine ridership volume.

Lyons pointed to a license plate survey at the Irvine station parking lot showed that fewer than one in five cars were registered to Irvine residents, and that most belonged to drivers from Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, Laguna Niguel and other nearby cities.

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GROWING PAINS

The Irvine Transportation Center is the most popular station on Metrolink’s growing Orange County line, but the crush of rail commuters--especially on rainy days--has overwhelmed the parking lot. A look at the station’s ridership:

Daily number of riders boarding trains in 1997: 750

Number of parking spots: 537

Amtrak riders: 29%

Metrolink riders: 71%

Metrolink Orange County riders who use the Irvine station: 21%

Source: City of Irvine