Which Direction for Toll Roads?

* Re “Toll Road Consultants to Take a Different Route: Ask the Drivers,” March 24:

Maybe when toll road officials at the Transportation Corridor Agencies take their survey, they should give me a call.

I’d like to give them my opinion on an agency which hires a firm that was off by 40% in a 1993 study of the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, followed by another 16% error in 1998.

If their survey asked why I don’t use the toll road, I’d tell them that I can’t stand to pay the high tolls when my tax money is going to maintain public roads.

I hope they’d ask me my opinion on the proposed construction of the Foothill South toll road, because then they’d get an earful.

This road is not needed; the route of the proposed toll road nearly parallels Antonio Parkway. This toll road would not relieve congestion on Interstate 5; in fact, it would create another El Toro “Y” situation where it would dump onto Interstate 5 going south.

Additionally, the route of the Foothill South would cut through pristine open space--encouraging the kind of development and sprawl that I moved to south Orange County to avoid--and destroy the habitat of nine endangered species.

Nothing that the TCA has done in the last decade inspires any trust, so I can only wonder how it will conduct its survey. Will it be an above-board survey that includes people with opinions like mine, or will it only survey people who fit into its wishful projections?

JULIA DEWEES

San Clemente

* Re “Toll Roads May Hire Agent to Push Agencies Into Fast Lane,” April 5:

I am in favor of free enterprise in Orange County, but I also favor social responsibility in using my purchasing power to support my values.

Coca-Cola and McDonald’s should know that I will not buy their products if they are going to be connected to the toll road system in Orange County. These roads are laying the base for unrestrained growth and cutting up our open spaces, parks and quality of life for us and our children.

BARBARA ROSENBAUM

Coto de Caza

* Isn’t it time someone realized that we don’t need an agency to tell the powers that be that $2 a trip is too much for the short distance and for our first exposure to toll fees?

It’s just too high for the “average driver.” Twice as many people would have used the road at a toll less than $2.

BONNIE ZILLIGITT

Corona del Mar

* Try as I might, I can’t think of the hapless Orange County toll road agency management “as a sports star.”

Scrambling for a gimmick to stop the financial free-fall of the unpopular San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, Wally Kreutzen, head of all three county toll road agencies, sounds delusional.

Kreutzen says we are to think of Michael Jordan, who “made a fair amount of money as a basketball player and then he made a whole lot more doing commercials.” All the road lacks, we’re to believe, is a good agent.

Michael Jordan wasn’t deeply in debt when he began to do commercials, as the San Joaquin Hills toll road agency is. Bankruptcy didn’t loom a few years off, when heavy payments would come due.

Jordan had performed above everyone’s expectations, not lost money steadily or overstated the number of loyal fans he would attract.

And he never took public money to keep up his property or lobbied Washington to change laws to benefit him, as the agency did.

The agencies’ heavy-handed treatment of the public has antagonized much of the road’s potential ridership, and at any rate the toll road doesn’t go where drivers need traffic relief.

JANET REMINGTON

Costa Mesa