A Yellow Light for Elevated Tollway

While Sacramento has been trying to figure out what to do about the troubled private toll road experiment on the Riverside Freeway, a companion project in Orange County has been revived by developers hoping to beat the clock before an enabling franchise expires at the end of the year.

Support from the Orange County Transportation Authority is being sought. OCTA presumably should be wiser since these private road experiments were inaugurated a decade ago. It should go slowly with appropriate skepticism.

The extension of the Orange Freeway would run down the Santa Ana River bed, linking the celebrated Orange Crush freeway exchange, where several freeways intersect in the northern part of the county, with the San Diego Freeway near South Coast Plaza.

The project was moribund until two out-of-state firms joined to plan a nearly $1-billion elevated tollway. The road initially won approval along with the Riverside Freeway project back in 1990 but has been on the back burner.

This latest cousin in the private toll road family must be evaluated with full awareness of the potential pitfalls.

We have learned in recent years how troublesome these projects can be. The passage of time has tempered the attractiveness of private toll roads when there was little prospect of new publicly financed freeways.

On the 91 Express Lanes on the Riverside Freeway’s Orange county section, an agreement was made to put off freeway improvements in order to shore up the financial position of operators, who were concerned about competition from free roads.

Since the scandal broke last year, concern has remained that improvements on Orange County freeways would be jeopardized by a similar competition ban for the proposed elevated freeway.

American Transportation Development, the firm planning the road, has said it would negotiate a new agreement to allow the state to repair and upgrade nearby roads previously considered to be competition. It argues that its concern is that no new parallel freeway come on line as competition.

However that issue may be resolved, a fundamental concern remains. At the heart of all these projects always will be the question of for whose benefit they exist, the road developers or the general public?

On the Riverside Freeway project, the state was reduced to being a facilitator of private transactions when a sale of the lanes, facilitated by tax-exempt bonds, almost went through.

It was called off when details of the arrangement became public. Caltrans in the past was too secretive in dealing with private toll road interests.

Problems with projected ridership on Orange County’s other quasi-public toll roads also provide a sign of caution for this new venture. Finally, neighborhoods in Fountain Valley and Santa Ana must be heard.