Why Light Rail? So Agency Can Justify Existence

The Orange County Transportation Authority wants to build a 30-mile trolley line connecting the cities of Fullerton and Irvine via Disneyland, MainPlace/Santa Ana, South Coast Plaza and John Wayne Airport. But there is a fly in the ointment.

The authority has spent more than $10 million only to find out that a light-rail trolley would not reduce traffic congestion and its collateral effect, air pollution. Not to worry, however; it has buried this negative information in fine print and unintelligible numerical doublespeak. OCTA is now promoting the trolley as a required new transportation “choice.”

The authority and its predecessor organizations have been studying the prospects for Orange County rail for more than 20 years. A federally mandated Major Investment Study released in 1997 revealed that rail alternatives were the least effective of all transportation modes, but the OCTA Board of Directors nevertheless pushed forward a draft environmental impact report for light rail.

Released in October 1999, the draft was rejected by the cities of Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana, as well as the 1998-99 Orange County Grand Jury. Altogether, the three Orange County core cities issued more than 80 pages of technical reasons why light rail was a bad idea.

Was rail to be denied? Not yet. The authority went back to the well and pulled out a supplemental environmental impact report that rearranges the trolley routing around the city of Orange and overhead (instead of ground level) through the west side of Santa Ana.

Continued funding of this boondoggle should be stopped. The 86,000 riders per day that OCTA predicts will use the CenterLine rail system by 2020 equates to less than a 1% reduction in total trips per day generated by cars, buses and bicycles. And the 86,000 riders per day probably will be people taking round trips, and the majority of them former bus riders. It isn’t 86,000 people; it’s 43,000 people riding round trip.

Over the past 18 years light rail systems have been built in 12 major cities throughout the United States; OCTA always uses Portland as an example of a successful light rail system retrofitted to an existing community. But Portland is not Orange County.

Portland has a central downtown business district with a large percentage of people commuting to and from the suburbs to work daily. Orange County is a sprawling residential suburbia with many scattered work centers.

A rail system simply cannot provide the geographical coverage that a flexible multi-route bus system can. The value of a light rail system is in its ability to move a significant percentage of a local population from home to work daily, which is not possible here because of our low-density residential sprawl. Under this condition, light rail becomes relegated to being a mere novelty, a “trolley ride.”

In 1990, after two previous failed attempts, Orange County voters passed Measure M, which provided for a half-cent sales tax increase for 20 years. These funds have provided the major portion of staff salaries at OCTA, for which they were required to perform specified traffic improvement projects. Without the sales tax provided by Measure M, OCTA risks layoffs and staff downsizing when Measure M sunsets in March 2011. And without a project such as the CenterLine, OCTA has no reason to justify extending the sales tax beyond 2011.

OCTA claims to have a mandate from the public to design and build the CenterLine. But let’s examine more closely that so-called mandate.

One of the line items identified in Measure M was $340 million for “initiating a high-capacity urban rail on existing rail right-of-way”--otherwise referred to by OCTA as “High Technology Advanced Rail Transit.” It is this language in Measure M that OCTA cites as its “voter mandate” to proceed with the CenterLine. But the CenterLine is neither “high technology” nor “high capacity,” nor is it proposed to be built on “existing rail right-of-way.” It is a 19th-century-technology, electrically powered, slow-moving trolley, occupying existing traffic lanes on existing arterial highways.

With its very future at stake, it is not surprising that OCTA has already tried to get special legislation passed in Sacramento to require a simple majority vote to extend the half-cent sales tax beyond 2011. Without such legislation, it would take a two-thirds majority vote, which is difficult to achieve in tax-conscious Orange County. Although its first attempt failed, OCTA no doubt will try again to undo the Proposition 13-mandated two-thirds vote.

Council members in cities along the route of the proposed CenterLine and the members of the OCTA board have the ability to put an end to this project by voting it down.

The public does not need to be saddled with an endless financial burden that provides very little public benefit just to keep OCTA in business.

The CenterLine trolley should be abandoned as a bad idea, and efforts and funds should be redirected to enlarging the bus system.