91 Lanes Owner Accuses Caltrans of Skewing Data

Operators of the 91 Express Lanes charged Tuesday that Caltrans concocted a safety problem on the Riverside Freeway to sneak through a road-widening project that state officials knew they couldn’t justify.

“Caltrans has fabricated the safety data,” said Christopher Garrett, a San Diego attorney who represents California Private Transportation Co., which operates the toll lanes that run along the freeway median for 10 miles from eastern Anaheim to the Riverside County border.

“I have never found anyone at Caltrans who will now say those figures are accurate,” Garrett said.

Caltrans officials declined to comment on the charges, other than to say they have started an internal review to find out what numbers were used to prepare a 1997 traffic safety report and subsequent reports in 1999 that showed a substantial increase in accidents--up to 124%--after the toll lanes were built.

Accidents had increased on one stretch near the entrance to the toll lanes by about 20% between fiscal year 1996-97 and 1998-99, Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said.

A separate Times analysis of state accident records showed that injury accidents had increased by nearly a third along the 10-mile stretch next to the toll lanes in the three years since they opened. National and statewide accidents remained flat during the same three-year period.

Meanwhile, state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) said outside experts will independently sort through the numbers to find out whether there is a safety problem.

“An outside analysis of the safety issue is critical,” said Dunn, who serves on the Senate Transportation Committee. “We have to find out what was motivating Caltrans, why they wanted to do this particular project to begin with.”

Dunn will attempt to get answers before next Tuesday’s special joint hearing of the Assembly and Senate Transportation committees. The hearing in Sacramento was called to review Caltrans’ role in the settlement of a $100-million lawsuit brought by the toll operator to block the planned road improvements. Legislators are also reviewing the aborted sale of the toll lanes to a nonprofit group.

Dunn and his aides are wading through more than a dozen boxes of Caltrans documents released Friday.

In January 1999, traffic engineers wrote that widening the freeway would cut accidents by a third. But Caltrans Director Jose Medina agreed to abandon the road improvements as part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the operators of the 91 toll lanes, which argued that the extra lanes would hurt business on the toll lanes and violated a “non-compete” clause written into the contract.

The suit was dropped, Drago said, “because the proposed project did not meet the test of a safety improvement.”

Caltrans officials did disagree about the meaning of the accident statistics, but they agreed that adding the lanes likely would reduce wrecks. Even in the lawsuit settlement, the agency asserted that it still had safety concerns on the Riverside Freeway.

Garrett, the toll group’s attorney, raised for the first time Tuesday the allegation that Caltrans “fabricated the data to get around the franchise agreement.” by ignoring data obtained from sections of the freeway where there were no accidents.

“Caltrans left out sections of the freeway that didn’t have accidents,” Garrett said. “They intentionally deleted out the mile markers that didn’t have any accidents.”

If some sections did have more accidents, Garrett said, that would be explained by the higher volume of traffic on the four toll lanes.

The freeway is actually safer because of the 91 Express Lanes, he and other toll road officials said.

“We would never stand in the way of letting Caltrans make legitimate safety improvements,” said Greg Hulsizer, head of the California Private Transportation Co., which commissioned a traffic consultant to review Caltrans’ data.

Hulsizer, and possibly Garrett, plan to testify at next Tuesday’s hearing. They also said Tuesday that the partners in the toll lane project might be willing to sell the lanes back to the state--for the right price.

If the state wants to widen the road, toll road officials said, they would force Caltrans to compensate them for business lost by those motorists enticed off the toll lanes.

The state could also buy out the toll road consortium by paying “the fair market value” for toll lanes, which they say amounted to more than $200 million.

* BUMPY ROAD FOR BOSS

Caltrans director now accused of steering state contract to company despite higher bid. A3