Driven to Differences on Toll Road

* The Transportation Corridor Agencies have run ads indicating that one’s drive to the snow resorts from South County by using the toll road would be “uninterrupted� and that you’d “be going uphill almost as fast as you’ll be coming down.� I have tried that route on weekend getaways only to find that traffic backs up to a standstill on the northbound toll road as the road merges with the eastbound Riverside Freeway.

Recently, I decided to give the toll road another try, figuring that the last time had been an anomaly. However, this last attempt was worse than previous. I had to slow to a stop on the toll road as far back as three to four miles from the interchange. The time it took us to get from San Clemente to be moving eastbound on the freeway was greater than my many previous experiences simply driving the freeway route. And this sort of backup comes at a time when usage of this road is still in the infancy stage. It is a ghost town until it meets the freeway. This toll road is in no way, shape or form a “shortcut� or “time-saver.�

What I don’t understand is, how is this toll road ever going to pay for itself? Neither daily commuter nor weekend traveler will ever pay for something that doesn’t cut down driving times. For a toll road to support itself, it must have the day-in, day-out commuter traffic utilize it.

To spend any more money on extending this white elephant further south is ludicrous. We taxpayers eventually will get stuck with the debt load when this toll road goes broke.

ALLAN H. ROY

San Clemente

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* Re “Hearings Focus on Plan for Final Leg in Tollway System,� March 26:

Your reporter four times referred to those who spoke against the project as “environmentalists.� The repetitious use of this term is both lazy and misleading.

When Ronald Reagan famously called himself an environmentalist, it signified that the term had lost any real meaning. In current usage, it mainly implies a false division between people who value humans and people who value nature.

Nobody really wants to live in a polluted, congested, fragmented landscape, although now that virtually the entire region is polluted, congested and fragmented, it’s rather difficult to avoid this sad circumstance.

Increasing numbers of people from all walks of life realize that our only chance of reducing future levels of ugliness and destruction is to demand that government cease promoting the careless mega-development (“master-planning�) that has become so pervasive during the past couple of decades. How about calling us perceptive or nobody’s fools?

ROBB HAMILTON

Long Beach

* Local politicians should take heed of the 1,000 people who showed up at the Federal Highway Administration hearing recently to voice their concerns about the Foothill South toll road. We need to stop this project before it ruins some of our last remaining open space and the only place on the Southern California coast where you can still find steelhead trout and hike from the mountains to the ocean without passing through a city.

Far from reducing gridlock, the urban sprawl the toll road will generate will make it worse, especially for those who now use the Santa Ana Freeway. The anti-toll road and anti-airport forces must unite if we are to keep Orange County from becoming a vast wasteland of urban sprawl.

DAVID BENDALL

Aliso Viejo