A Route to Speedier Roadwork?

Progress comes at a price, and Orange County motorists for years have had both their pocketbooks and their patience taxed by extensive freeway projects. But if lost time is a problem for commuters, a potential boon is the practice of offering financial incentives for contractors who can get jobs done ahead of schedule. The daily torture for commuters during the nearly two-year freeway work at the closed Costa Mesa Freeway interchange with the Garden Grove Freeway has been a case in point.

At various times during the last decade, widening along the Santa Ana Freeway has slowed rush-hour traffic to a crawl through bottlenecks in Anaheim to the north and the mammoth El Toro Y to the south. But those projects seem to have been done with dispatch. Cash incentives were used along portions of the Santa Ana Freeway project and elsewhere.

Today anyone traveling from points south to North County can stall in traffic for an hour or more during the evening rush hour. The California Department of Transportation asserts that the barriers, detours and closures will pay off with work done comfortably within the deadline period of June. The diversion of cars along 17th Street, followed by an excruciating crawl along Tustin Avenue to reach the westbound Garden Grove Freeway, has had many drivers annoyed. Alas, a closed northbound connector opened Friday.

Caltrans said it was unwilling to build incentives in because of cost. Perhaps it will be worth the wait. The underpass connecting the northbound Costa Mesa Freeway with the Garden Grove Freeway closed more than a year. At such times, incentives look appealing indeed.