Firm Hired Despite Its Missteps

A traffic forecasting firm that seriously miscalculated ridership on the county’s toll roads has won a contract for a new study, despite concerns about the company’s past mistakes.

In a unanimous vote at Thursday’s board meeting, officials awarded Wilbur Smith and Associates a $90,000 contract to study ridership habits on the San Joaquin Hills toll road.

Board members of the Transportation Corridor Agencies said the firm’s selection was necessary because the study needed to be done quickly and required only data collection and not traffic predictions. It was not, however, a vote of confidence in a company whose faulty projections for the 15-mile toll road between Newport Beach and San Clemente have had serious repercussions, they said.

Last month, officials had to dip into $40 million in savings to guarantee debt on the road after the major Wall Street bond ratings agencies said they had misgivings about the road’s performance. Even with that step, one agency downgraded its rating of the agencies’ $1.7 billion in bonds, and another issued a warning to investors that the road’s prospects had gone from “stable” to “negative.”

The troubles have angered board members, who say they plan to get to the bottom of why the forecasters were so far off. Current traffic on the road is more than 40% short of original estimates made in 1993 and is still lagging 16% behind revised predictions made when the road was refinanced in 1998.

“When I hire a professional to go out and do a job, I expect that they’ll do it 110% not 40%,” San Juan Capistrano Mayor Collene Campbell said. Campbell said she would continue to ask tough questions like the ones she posed to Wilbur Smith representatives at a meeting last week of a board subcommittee.

Whether to keep using Wilbur Smith, one of only three nationally recognized traffic forecasters for toll roads, will likely be reconsidered in the coming months, officials said. The firm has a contract with the Transportation Corridor Agencies that expires in June 2002.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Ed Regan, a Wilbur Smith vice president, said his firm would like to continue its decade-long relationship with Orange County’s toll roads.

The firm, Regan said, has been on the mark with its newest projections for the Foothill/Eastern Corridor. While original estimates for the 26-mile toll road that connects the Riverside Freeway in Anaheim with the Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine were too high, traffic on the road is currently at or exceeding revisions made for last year’s refinancing of the road.

And Regan said his firm has an excellent overall record, citing more than $50 billion in transportation needs nationwide that have been financed using Wilbur Smith studies. The economic downturn of the 1990s, combined with a later-than-anticipated opening of the road, caused the errors in estimates, he said.

“What it really shows you is this is a very difficult thing to do,” Regan said. “You have hundreds of thousands of people making decisions each day, and you do the best you can. There’s no perfect crystal ball.”

The latest study will mark the first time toll road officials analyze actual traffic patterns on the road. They plan to survey customers about their habits in anticipation of introducing “value pricing”--charging different tolls at different times of the day. A federal grant will cover about 80% of the costs.