A Freeway Planning Wreck

Orange County has had some of the worst traffic in the state but has a pretty good track record of trying to solve the problem.

On a project in South County, that laudable record of getting things done went awry on a system that would have used computers to direct motorists around congested traffic spots.

The new system was not an expensive or especially complicated one by the standards of Orange County transportation projects.

Why all this happened is a mystery. How to avoid having it happen again is something worth pondering after a post-mortem report by the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley.

The report found that a “smart streets” project for the El Toro Y was a boondoggle. The high-tech project consisted of sensors, cameras and signals to reroute traffic to local streets in the event of a freeway shutdown.

After five years of planning and $3 million in spending, the Federal Highway Administration, Caltrans and the city of Irvine walked away from the project. They did so before the technology was ever installed, and after key participants argued and lost money.

Caltrans is said to be so frustrated by the experience that it is reluctant to participate in any other pilot projects like it.

The big road-improvement projects have been handled much more smoothly.

In the last decade, engineers and road builders in Orange County have put down new freeway lanes where walls and old infrastructure once stood.

They have erected elevated ramps to carry waves of new commuters high over old rights of way. Bridges have gone up while traffic has inched forward below. Today, crews are still at it--for example, the towers of concrete encircled by steel frames going up at the junction of the San Diego and Costa Mesa freeways.

Perhaps nothing in the widespread reconfiguring of Orange County roads and freeways rivaled the engineering artistry that produced sweeping pathways to the sky at the El Toro Y, where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways meet in South County. The Y is an interchange of global renown among traffic engineers because of its traffic volume and complexity of design. For locals, it is known by its nickname, instantly recognizable to Orange County motorists bound anywhere south. The Y and its neighbor to the north, the Orange Crush at the junction of the Garden Grove, Orange and Santa Ana freeways, are among the most identifiable symbols of Orange County life.

A characteristic of these engineering feats countywide is that they involved remarkable cooperation between levels of government and the public. Agencies and cities worked with one another. Voters, after several failed attempts to pass a sales tax, agreed in 1990 to approve one in fiscally conservative Orange County to pay for needed improvements.

Perhaps it is too much to expect that these transportation triumphs, large and small, would happen without some glitches. Enter the computerized Intelligent Transportation System for the El Toro Y, which was paid for by the federal government six years ago but never came online.

The result of having no emergency diversion system in place was that in January, one hazardous-waste spill on the San Diego Freeway brought rush-hour traffic to its knees. The new Y, for all its breathless improvements in freeway motoring, was reduced to a replay of the old days. Before the interchange was upgraded, commuters routinely built in extra time knowing that they would face delays there.

This project would have directed traffic onto local streets and back on the freeway by using sensors and message signs. It was worth seeing through, and there don’t seem to be very satisfactory answers on why it stalled. In today’s high-tech world, it doesn’t seem a large task for freeway and local traffic controllers to coordinate their efforts.

The cost of this project was not large by the scale of freeway improvements going on around it. In fact, while millions are still a lot of money, some critics have suggested that its relatively low budget compared with other big-ticket projects may have made it easier for the bureaucrats to write off.

Whether that is true or not, there is no doubt that the project would have addressed an important concern. Also, if the agencies have shown an ability to get the big things right, there isn’t much excuse for letting the little ones fall through the cracks.