A nice slogan which addresses the reality of the overwhelming mass of people in our region, as in much of the Southland, who prefer to travel on car roads rather than rail roads.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The Orange Grove: O.C. prefers more lanes to trains
Adding roadway capacity provides real traffic relief versus mass-transit schemes.
By JERRY AMANTE
Mayor Pro Tem of Tustin, a director of the Orange County Transportation Authority
Orange County transportation leaders have a clear-eyed understanding that freeway widenings and arterial improvements provide real traffic relief, and many officials in Los Angeles County who have placed nearly all their eggs in one basket – transit basket – don't like the comparisons.
The Orange County Transportation Authority is completing the final couple miles of widening the Santa Ana (Interstate 5) Freeway, all the way up to the L.A. County line, and a widening of the San Diego (I-405) Freeway is next on the agenda. This has some L.A. leaders in an uproar because, while they continue their decades-long practice of flushing millions in transportation tax dollars down the drain on public transit, their constituents are increasingly noticing the difference between the intermittent traffic on Orange County freeways and the gridlock they experience on L.A. freeways.
There is a philosophical difference between OCTA's reputation as a road-builder – at least since the proposed CenterLine light-right system was laid to rest several years ago – and Los Angeles' Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which focuses its resources on subways and rail. What it boils down to is that, in Orange County we're proud to build lanes, not trains.
Many Democrats in Sacramento were apoplectic about the governor's proposal earlier this summer to help balance the state budget by trimming the bloated public transit budget. But while buses, trains, monorails and subways seem like enticing transportation solutions in theory, they simply don't pencil out. Not in terms of true traffic relief for the vast majority of commuters and certainly not from a fiscal standpoint.
Consider this statistic: Nationwide, spending on public transit has increased seven-fold since 1960. And what have those billions of dollars done for commuters? Not much. During that same period, the number of public transit users has dropped by 63 percent and today less than five percent of all Americans use public transportation.
Over the past 30 years the United States has increased road capacity by 5 percent while we have 143 percent more cars on the road today than we did in 1977. But for some reason, despite the fact that money put into freeways is 11 times as cost-effective as money put into light rail, in most of California roadways remain the red-headed stepchild of transportation improvements.
