More Freeway Work Ahead?

In the past seven years, Orange County has poured some $4 billion into pouring concrete, creating three toll roads, smoothing out the infamous El Toro Y, widening various freeways and building expensive carpool lane flyovers that seemingly reach the sky.

Despite the construction frenzy, transportation planners are poised to roll out a new campaign against congestion: stamping out dreaded “choke points.”

Caltrans and Orange County Transportation Authority engineers have identified 23 choke points--spots prone to chronic congestion--and are proposing to use Measure M sales tax revenue to fix some of these kinks, a third of which are in South County.

Six choke points are clustered on Interstate 5, from Alicia Parkway in Laguna Hills and Mision Viejo to the Ortega Highway in San Juan Capistrano. Even during peak hours, cars often glide through the Y where the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways meet, only to bunch up a couple of miles down the highway.

The improvements to the El Toro Y helped, but not nearly enough. The bottleneck has simply shifted farther south.

The tie-ups on Interstate 5 are easy to explain, said Joe El Harake, chief of Caltrans’ traffic operations and strategies branch. The $168-million El Toro Y project, completed about 2 1/2 years ago, squeezes traffic from 26 lanes to 10 lanes in three short miles.

When the Y was widened, “the amount of money available was not sufficient to do what we wanted to do,” El Harake said, such as extending the extra lanes south to Crown Valley Parkway. Instead, the lanes end at Alicia Parkway.

“You have to phase in any improvements,” El Harake said. “You can’t do it all at one time.” Also exacerbating the problem are surface street design problems or narrow offramps, such as those at La Paz Road that force cars to line up on the freeway.

OCTA and Caltrans have zeroed in on four choke points in Irvine and South County:

* Widening the Interstate 5 interchange at Ortega Highway.

* Expanding the Culver Drive offramp from the Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine from one to two lanes and reconfiguring the intersection at the base of the offramp.

* Rebuilding the La Paz crossing under Interstate 5. Mission Viejo and Laguna Hills city officials also are planning street improvements to remedy congestion.

* Retooling the Avery Parkway crossing under Interstate 5. Mission Viejo is planning to widen Avery Parkway.

OCTA officials are still refining cost estimates for those four projects. They want to use Measure M money but have yet to get approval.

Another reason for traffic tie-ups in South County: The San Joaquin Hills tollway isn’t siphoning away as many cars from Interstate 5 as toll road officials predicted. The $800-million toll road, used by an average 81,000 cars on weekdays, is running about 85% of original projections, said Lisa Telles, spokeswoman for the toll road authority.

Caltrans’ El Harake said that while South County might have more choke points than other regions of the county, those glitches will be easier and cheaper to fix than some of the more systemic snags elsewhere.

There is little land left to expand the Costa Mesa Freeway, and crews are rebuilding much of the Santa Ana Freeway north to eliminate the awkward, and sometimes dangerous, ramps that exit to the left. In addition, environmental and cost factors forced the state to scale back earlier plans to add four lanes to the Santa Ana Freeway.

Some choke points will be more difficult to tame. The $85-million Orange Crush interchange, where the Santa Ana, Orange and Garden Grove freeways meet, has two such problems.

Planners would like new transitions at Bristol Sreet and the Orange Crush. They’re also designing a wider Garden Grove Freeway, and new offramps to The City Drive in Orange. That popular offramp sits a cozy 900 feet from the Orange Crush, further snarling traffic. Improvements to The City Drive offramps alone would cost $42 million.

Another difficult design would be to improve the transition from the southbound lanes of the Santa Ana Freeway to the southbound Costa Mesa Freeway, said Dave Elbaum, OCTA director of planning and development. Although these are the same bridges that Caltrans rebuilt in 1996, there’s still a problem: The freeway curves and traffic signs for several offramps compete for the attention of drivers.

“There are so many movements that happen there all at once,” Elbaum said.

Other proposed projects:

* Two new transition lanes on the Orange Freeway between Katella Avenue and the Riverside Freeway, and in Fullerton between Chapman Avenue and Lambert Road.

* A lane on the Orange Freeway dedicated to trucks making the steep climb from Lambert Road to Tonner Canyon Road.

* New lanes for the San Diego Freeway in Irvine between the Laguna Freeway and Culver Drive, and in Westminster and Huntington Beach between Talbert Avenue and Beach Boulevard.

“Sometimes these things are very simple, and sometimes very difficult to solve,” El Harake said. “These facilities were designed more than 30 years ago. But on every interchange, we are trying to do something about it and make it better to make a positive change in people’s lives.”