180 Miles of Bad Road

If road construction were an earthquake, Orange County would be the epicenter.

It’s not your imagination. Every freeway in the county is undergoing some type of construction, or is about to.

And the numbers behind the work are enough to startle even the most hardened commuter. Caltrans is spending nearly $1 million a day on 60 projects, covering 180 highway miles. More road work is going on in Orange County than in any other county in California. One sign of the times: Caltrans spent $31,300 in the last year just for new orange traffic cones.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the boom is that it is intentional. Transportation officials meant to roll out all these projects at the same time.

“We’re doing 20 years of freeway work in 10 years,” said Dave Elbaum, planning director for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

The condensed schedule “means the roads get done as quickly as possible, and that’s the bottom line,” Elbaum said. “We want to give the benefit of that to the people, in as short a period of time as possible. We’re talking decades of benefit.”

Few highway projects were approved or funded in the 1970s and ‘80s. The situation left congestion and such pent-up demand that voters agreed in 1990 to pay a higher sales tax for road improvements. The tax, called Measure M, has had the same effect as popping the top off a bottle of soda, unleashing a torrent of transportation dollars.

Add to that the millions of dollars the federal government has recently allocated to cities for street improvements, and you have even more detours and delays.

“We’ve had a fairly heavy infusion of federal dollars, and that has given us a lot more opportunities,” said Jim Beil, Caltrans construction chief in Orange County.

Of the $788 million in road construction projects Caltrans has going in the area, nearly half is being funded by the federal government.

The biggest project has been the widening of the Santa Ana Freeway, the backbone of the county’s transportation network. By the time work wraps up next year, the northern portion of the freeway will have cost $100 million per mile.

“The I-5 north is probably one of the most complicated road projects in the entire country,” said Barry Rabbitt, Caltrans chief of program management in Orange County. “You’ve got a lot of contractors working right next to each other, and we’ve got to coordinate all of those activities. Plus, there is a tremendous amount of traffic through there with Disneyland, the [Arrowhead] Pond, the stadium and the Anaheim Convention Center.”

Caltrans is also widening and adding carpool lanes to the Orange, Costa Mesa and Riverside freeways. Soon, work will begin on the San Diego-Costa Mesa freeway interchange and the nearby junction with the Corona del Mar Freeway.

Construction on the Costa Mesa Freeway has made an already tough daily commute even more challenging, and a recent weekend resurfacing of the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa and Fountain Valley created hourlong delays.

Anaheim, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Irvine and other cities are also overhauling surface streets, introducing more headaches for drivers. Add to the mix the usual subterranean projects, such as repairing or replacing sewer lines.

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To some weary motorists, it might seem like all the construction is done haphazardly. But transportation planners say that’s not the case. Every Monday, officials spend hours going over the week’s construction plan. And Caltrans staggers projects to keep traffic moving and typically closes roads and ramps only from midnight to 5 a.m. In fact, the vast majority of heavy construction occurs at night.

“We break it down into a number of approachable, doable segments,” Rabbitt said. “We’re very mindful of wanting to maintain circulation through the communities. We plan these projects, and time them by spreading out the work. You have to do things in small bites. So sometimes it takes a while to get things done.”

So, how do transportation planners make important decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of drivers? How do they figure out which freeways to rip up, and in what order? To explain, Elbaum, pulled out a map of the county that resembles a plate of spaghetti.

“We sort of blend science, art and opportunity,” Elbaum said. “We look at what we are able to do, and what we can afford to do.”

They study traffic patterns, paying close attention to housing, shopping and employment centers. Then they make projections by factoring in population growth estimates. For instance, within 20 years, Orange County’s population is expected to swell by 22%--to 3.24 million residents.

An estimated 875,000 new jobs will be created, attracting more workers who live outside Orange County.

“The whole economy in Orange County responds to the transportation system,” Elbaum said.

That means more road work to come. Caltrans and OCTA last month identified 23 freeway bottlenecks that need further work. Seven of the chronic tie-ups are on Interstate 5 in South County, from Laguna Hills to San Juan Capistrano.

So, even after this round of road work, Caltrans won’t be retiring those orange cones any time soon.

OCTA’s Elbaum said it helps to compare the construction headaches to a bout with the flu. “You feel terrible, awful while you have it. But two days after it’s over, you don’t even remember being sick.”

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Road Work Ahead

A look at current and future highway improvement projects in Orange County, financed largely with Measure M money.

FREEWAY MILES ADDED

1950s: 182

1960s: 578

1970s: 158

1980s: 86

1990s: 428

by 2020: 370 estimated

1990s include 280 toll and 148 freeway lane miles. By 2020 includes 256 toll and 114 freeway lane miles.

What is Measure M?

Measure M is the half cent sales tax approved by Orange County voters in 1990 for countywide transportation projects. The tax is expected to raise $3 billion over 20 years and pay for improvements to the county’s system of freeways, surface streets and provide mass transit alternatives. So far, $1.7 billion of Measure M money has been spent, on everything from city street repairs to the billion dollar widening of the Santa Ana Freeway and the soon-to-be underway San Diego-Costa Mesa transitway.

Source: Southern California Assn. of Governments, Caltrans, OCTA