ORANGE COUNTY:Eastern Opens 80k/day free, 46k/day toll

The Transp Corridor Agency’s (TCA) Eastern Toll Road (CA-241/133) opened Oct 18 running about 80k vehicles a day during an introductory no-tolls 8-days. The first few days of tolling from Monday Oct 26 saw about 46k trips/day. The TCA generates numbers combined for the Eastern and the attached, older Foothill pike so we simply subtracted the 38k trips/day of the Foothill before the Eastern opened from the combined numbers to get Eastern numbers (assuming that the Eastern hasn’t boosted Foothill ridership)

The new toll road built through rugged country in the Santa Ana mountain range parallel to the Pacific Coast links the coastal plain of Orange County (2.7m pop) with the portentously named Inland Empire of Riverside (pop 1.5m) and San Bernardino counties (pop 1.6m) to the east. The Eastern’s 2x3-lanes adds 50% to highway capacity through the mountains since it takes off from the CA-91 Riverside Fwy (4/2X/2X/4 lanes) just inside the Santa Ana River canyon at the Riverside/Orange Co line and provides an alternate route to CA-91 and CA-55 (Costa Mesa Fwy) for traffic heading into the center of the Orange county from inland. There are highly directional traffic flows west in the mornings to Orange Co with the high paying jobs from the economical housing areas over the mountains to the east.

The new pike is a shortcut for traffic heading to Irvine and points south in Orange Co. The 27km opened Oct 18 links CA-91 to the TCA’s existing Foothill pike, its oldest, but more importantly to the huge I-5 Fwy (325k veh/day on 12-lanes) and to the short CA-133 Laguna Fwy.

By most accounts the opening went very smoothly. The weather was perfect. People flocked to drive the new road just for the sake of experiencing the new scenery. Plans to deal with a feared surge of new traffic through Tustin and other suburbs with ICs weren’t needed. Signage worked. Lockheed Martin the toll contractor had its toll collectors handing out brochures and greeting motorists at the toll booths the first week. There was a big surge of demand for transponders and the FasTrak service center opened extended hours to establish new accounts and hand out the tags.

Lion threat

People commented how uncharacteristically LA the new pike was, how wild and almost remote. Megan Garvey of the LA Times wrote: “One stretch of the new toll road has no exits for 6.5 miles, another link goes uninterrupted for 6.2 miles. Birds fly overhead. The jutting rocks color hillsides in grays and browns. The peaks of the Santa Ana Mountains look like the wrinkles on a walrus’ neck. The area is so isolated that some radio stations fade out and cellular phone calls can be hard to make.”

Major negative press was the number of wildlife kills (5 deer and 2 coyotes in the first week) despite five wildlife underpasses and 2m to 3m high fencing along the road edges. Has anyone worked out how to prevent them coming up the IC ramps with the traffic?

Deer kills, which are an everyday occurence on most roads in the east, are apparently unusual in California and local newspapers frontpaged pictures of a dead deer in a TCA pickup. Only accident was a car that flipped dodging deer. No bears reported yet but it’s mountain lion country. (Will this be the first toll road where a mountain lion mauls a toll collector?)

The new toll road is ‘h’-shaped in plan and the 11km western leg of the ‘h’ (CA-261) which crosses under I-5 and leads into the west of Irvine is still under construction, but due to open in the spring of 99.

Construction by Silverado Constructors, a joint venture of FCI, Sukut, Wayss & Freytag and Obayashi began Oct 95, so the bulk of the work was complete in 3 years, a year ahead of schedule, despite once in a hundred-year rains Dec 97 which caused $6m of washaways and set work back months. Silverado gets 70% of net toll revenues over the next year as its contractual reward for helping open the road early. It was up for toll-related penalties if the road had opened late.

The work involved 4 fwy-to-fwy interchanges (ICs), 5 arterial ICs, 69 bridges, 1.2m tons of asphalt and 0.5m cub yds of concrete. Silverado built piers for the 3-level IC with CA-91 at the northern end of the Eastern back in 1995 when 91X was under construction, saving it from disturbing the operations of the investor-built pike. 63m cub yds of earth was moved for the Eastern or nearly as much as the 70m cub yds of the 141km (88mi) long West Virginia Turnpike, built in 1953 and regarded as the nation’s second most mountainous pike. (The Penna pike is probably the most.)

CH2M Hill did design and Raytheon Infrastructure was engineering manager. Corridor Design Management, a joint venture of HNTB, PB and PBS&J was program manager. The design-build contract for the 38km of Eastern (and the associated extension of the Foothill to meet it) was for $765m for a cost of $20m/route-km. The road is a mix of 2x3 and 2x2 and it has truck climbing lanes on some of the steep (up to 6%) grades so the per lane-km costs are about $4m. Over 10% of the cost ($80m) is said to have been environmental mitigation.

There are 4 mainline toll plazas and 6 ramp plazas with a total of 42 toll lanes. The mainline plazas are designed for full highway speed open road tolling by transponder. Transponder-equipped motorists simply continue on a 2-lane section of open roadway with sensors in the pavement for vehicle classification and under a gantry equipped with antennas and cameras, while motorists paying cash diverge onto a dual-lane exit ramp which widens beside the ET roadway into a conventional manual toll plaza with collectors in toll booths. The plaza toll lanes are all equipped with coin machines and antennas for electronic tolling in case motorists with transponders go into the plaza, or to maintain e-tolling if there’s an accident or repaving work that requires the open road tolling section to be closed.

The flatrate toll is $3.25 for a car traveling the 27km, 12c/km or 19c/mile.

Time saving

The TCA estimated beforehand that a trip Corona (R’side Co) to Irvine would save 30mins. If so motorists would have to value their time saved at $6.50/hr or more to use the pike.

Reporters variously said that during the opening days the time saving was 8mins and 15mins. All this was before the tolls started. Of the 80k trips/day on the Eastern perhaps 20k were locals on the west side taking short-hops and 60k were trips taken from the 91. That’s a quarter of 91’s normal 240k traffic gone. No wonder she flowed freely. But with tolls on it looks as though maybe 30k to 35k has been taken off the 91, a 10 to 15% reduction. Also enough to make a very big difference to the 91. The associated 55 reportedly was still slowing again.

Joe El Harake the Caltrans official overseeing the toll roads got more press attention the week of the Eastern’s opening than the state governor Pete Wilson. But we eventually got him and he told us the new toll road was “working beautifully” and that it was a great “relief valve” for crowded freeways like 91, 55, and 5. CA-91 was flowing freely through most of the rush hour. Slowed traffic was reduced to about half the normal time.

TCA officials said they were “delighted.” Spokesman Michele Miller told us they feel good about the numbers, that they “validate the need for the toll road.”

91X

91X’s CPTC declined to tell us what had happened to their traffic, and probably the few days data to that point wouldn’t mean much.

Joe El Harake of Caltrans says his guess is they’ll have a lean time for 3 to 6 months, but he says “Latent demand in this corridor is very deep. The freer flowing conditions will encourage more trips. I think in 3 to 6 months we’ll have much of the traffic back again on 91.” (Contact Michele Miller TCA 714 513 3444 www.tcagencies.com Joe El Harake Caltrans 714 724 2373)