Area Commuters Suffer Rocky Road to Improvement : Transportation projects are still works in progress

Evidence that Orange County remains very much a work in progress is as close as the nearest means of transit: freeways adding lanes; toll roads coming into existence; more and more passengers boarding trains; buses rumbling down streets throughout the county.

The imperative is to get people from home to work, to the mall, to the soccer games. The danger is too many people in too many cars on too little asphalt will lead to gridlock more lasting than the momentary crushes during morning and evening rush hours.

When voters seven years ago approved a half-cent increase in the sales tax to pay for transportation improvements, they gave their assent to spending more than $300 million for an urban rail system. That was a sensible reflection of the fact that there is only so much room for freeways and surface streets and that a well-designed, cost-efficient train system probably can divert some drivers from the roads.

This month, the Orange County Transportation Authority, steward of the sales-tax increase money known as Measure M funds, kept the urban rail project on track. It was a good move, undertaken with the realization that a new urban rail system in this county is still very far from certain. If it becomes reality, it would require many more years of planning and building and many more millions of dollars.

The OCTA board’s continuation of the study of a rail system from Fullerton to Irvine gave the green light to spending $4 million to $6 million on a preliminary design. That would include route alignments, locations of train stations and information on what sort of technology would be used in construction. OCTA staff estimates the cost of a preliminary engineering project to be $25 million to $35 million. A final design could cost as much as $100 million.

Much of the money would come from the federal government. But whatever the source, it is taxpayers’ money, and it has to be spent carefully. A cautionary tale on the expense of rail projects can be found just to the north.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Los Angeles counterpart of the OCTA, five years ago proposed an overly ambitious plan for nearly 300 new miles of subway and light rail lines and more than 4,000 new buses. The estimated cost was $183 billion, and the time of construction was put at 30 years. As the recession deepened, the plan was cut severely: 95 miles of rail lines, 300 new buses. But the new plan too has been criticized as unrealistic.

OCTA has done a good job of sounding out public opinion through telephone surveys, questioning of bus and train riders, and public hearings. It also has drawn support from officials of several cities along the proposed 28-mile route, where one-third of the county’s residents live and more than half the jobs are based.

This most recent proposal for light rail, whether elevated or at ground level, has been under discussion for three years in Orange County. OCTA says its surveys show support for improvements in existing transportation and a willingness to consider a new train system, supplementing Metrolink and Amtrak. But the agency’s staff properly concluded that the support for trains is less than overwhelming; it said the small favorable majority means planners need to take “a cautious approach to planning and development of a future rail system.”

That sort of realism can help dodge problems that have plagued the subway system being built in Los Angeles. Given the projection of a 40% increase in traffic on the Fullerton-to-Irvine corridor in the next 15 years, the possibility of a new train system cannot be ruled out yet. The studies, the gathering of public information, the search for funding, are the right way to go.