22 Freeway Project Will Be a Monumental Waste

Re “Garden Grove Files 22 Freeway Suit,” Oct. 25:

The Garden Grove Freeway has long been the abandoned orphan of OCTA’s freeway planners. It is the last of Orange County’s freeways to be addressed, and the changes that the Orange County Transportation Authority are proposing will do little good and will serve only to make existing problems worse on streets in Garden Grove. In addition, the proposed approach will lead to waste, because it is being taken to do the job cheaply rather than correctly.

The freeway attracts far more traffic than it can efficiently handle. It needs more lanes, better interchanges and better planned and located on- and offramps. OCTA plans to add carpool lanes, widening the freeway and all of its overpasses.

But the freeway also affects surface streets, backing up traffic in the mornings and evenings. Many major streets need to be widened, but instead of building the new overpasses both longer and wider, to accommodate these widenings, OCTA is planning to widen only the existing overpasses, leaving the cities to pick up the costs of rebuilding an almost-new overpass in a few years.

Such monumental waste comes from a mind-set that it is more important to be seen as doing something than to actually be doing the right thing.

It is extremely frustrating to cities such as Garden Grove to have to pay for OCTA’s lack of planning and attention to the genuine transportation needs of Orange County.

Bruce A. Broadwater

Mayor, Garden Grove