San Joaquin Hills: California

California is getting a serious turnpike. And southern Orange county motorists are going to love it. It is going to let them drive their cars again, instead of creeping around the county, playing convoy duty on the highway, then sitting in lines idling, waiting and watching brake lights at overcrowded signal controlled intersections.

This is one great big city that has grown up after the state almost stopped building new highways in 1975. Most American counties are just a part of a metro area, with a town sized population (200k or 600k pop). But though it lacks any city name we know Orange county is big city in its own right. It has big city scandals, and like NY City, Philly etc it had a bankruptcy (which lost $70m in the toll authority’s money.) It has 2.7m people, which makes it as large as Minneapolis-StPaul metro area, and larger than the whole metro areas of St Louis, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Denver, Cincinatti or New Orleans. The statisticians count it as part of the LA metro area but the middle of the tollway being opened is 47 miles (75km) from downtown LA, almost halfway to San Diego. But whereas most U.S. metro areas this size have a kind of grid of expressways Orange Co only got itself a kind y-shape with a bar across it, and the southern half of the county just had the great coastal interstate, I-5, and large tracts of developing suburbs for miles on either side.

July 24 they get the first taste of a real turnpike — a 7 mile (11km) segment opens, the southern half. The bit being opened this month by its operator the Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA), a joint powers agency of a bunch of local cities and the county, is just a sampler, because they still have another 6 months work on the most important northern half. Apparently they opened this half because it was ready. It won’t attract much traffic, is my guess, but no matter. It will allow them to start working their toll systems and practicing their staffs, officials say. The real opening is scheduled for December, when the builders finish up and the whole of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor toll road should be complete (see “How come a Transportayshun Kurridore?” and why we dub it the San J. Hills pike.)

On completion the San J. Hills (SJH) pike will be 15 miles (24km) long, with 10 interchanges (2 more later), and will have cost $1.5 billion. Big money but come next year it looks like attracting traffic volumes and tolls to match. It will be the main highway for half a million people in southern and coastal communities to get to serious shops and to work north county and beyond. And it’ll be their way onto the state’s ‘freeway’ network north and south. Important, too, it will provide an alternate route for longdistance traffic. The more coast-hugging route through the LA area I-405 merges with the I-5 mid county at El-Toro. The ‘El Toro Y’ as the merge is called is a notorious bottleneck with I-5 which is the sole expressway-standard road south with around 300,000 veh/day on 12-lanes. When complete the SJH will provide a bypass of this most crowded section of I-5. It will present a more direct route for traffic between San Juan Capistrano, and places further south and the LA airport and the local John Wayne airport and other places south of LA. It will be a bypass for the so-called ‘Orange Crush’ the 600,000 veh/day interchange of 3 freeways — I-5, SR22, SR57 in the nroth of the county.

Greg Henk, TCA VP, says the trip from the I-5 southern end of the SJH to John Wayne airport near where toll patrons will rejoin the state freeway network at I-405 on the north end will take only 20 minutes compared to 45 to 60 minutes currently on the I-5 and I-405 freeways in rush hours.

At its northern end the SJH connects to the 3ml (5km) long Corona del Mar Freeway (SR-73) which is neatly connected to the northeast-bearing SR-55 freeway as well as to the northwest-bearing I-405. At its southerly end it hits I-5 just north of San Juan Capistrano and this freeway is being widened for a couple of miles south to handle merge and diverge movements.

The full SJH will have 14 ramp plazas and one mainline barrier plaza. It will open with an aggressive campaign to enrol patrons in FasTrak, the electronic toll system run by Lockheed Martin IMS. All the plazas will have FasTrak-only only toll lanes advertised as ‘non-stop.’ Tolls range between 50c and $1.00 in the first section, regardless of the hour. In connection with the bond sale it was predicted that 75,000 vehicles/day will use the SJH in 1997 and 120,000 in 2010, 3/4 local, 1/4 long distance. The toll rate at the mainline plaza is assumed $2 from 1997.

This is one highly viable toll road, covering debt service as well as operational costs easily, according to financial analyses, despite its big cost.

The roadway cuts a huge swath through quite hilly terrain because inside its 6-lanes is an 88 foot (26.8m) median which will allow a widening to 12-lanes divided, the size of I-5. Grades are up to 6% which will slow large trucks on the climb. Those grades also suggest any future rail transit might have to be a furnicular!

The TCA says $67m was spent on environmental mitigation including 262 acres of planting of coastal sage for endagered species of birds, 4 wildlife underpasses and establishment of 27 acres of new swamp. Gary Alstot, a local Laguna Beach engineer says that environmentalists blew the opportunity for further mitigation by their uncompromising and litigious hostility to the project. He would have liked sections of the roadway that are located in deep cuttings to have been roofed over for re-establishment of native fauna and flora, but says the greens forced millions to be squandered in a court battle that they lost, instead of negotiating practical engineering measures to minimize impact.

Despite the legal battle and a court ordered stay of construction on the central section of the road over a gnatcatcher bird the road is being opened ahead of time by the Keewit and Granite construction companies. They worked as partners under a design/build contract worth nearly $800m. Lockheed IMS is designing, installing and operating the toll systems that use the Texas Instruments TIRIS tags and e toll equipment that are standard in California and already in usein the north of the county at SR 91Express Lanes and on the TCA’s Foothill TC.

Around $1.2 billion was borrowed via sale of revenue bonds, $110m was gotten out of the state and federal governments and some $31m in developer impact fees. Wilbur Smith did the traffic projections.

The SJH pike will be the second to be opened by the Transportation Corridors Agencies (TCA), its first being named the Foothill Transportation Corridor (FTC), a 7.5ml (12km) toll road which opened two years ago and although unconnected to any other expressway standard roads is already carrying a respectable 30,000 vehicles/day. This Foothill pike will really come to life around 1999, when other sections of toll road to the north are opened, named the Eastern Transportation Corridor. The Eastern TC has a lower-case ‘h’ plan with the ascender traversing wild canyon country to connect with SR-91, a 270,000 v/day east-west 12-laner to easterly Riverside county. The Eastern TC’s h-plan is a 24 mile (39km) $700m system about a quarter built and will have the Foothill pike as a spur. Pencilled in is a general plan to eventually extend the Foothill nearly another 20ml (32km) southward to pick up traffic in the far southeast of the county and eventually join I-5 at San Clemente around the San Diego county line. (Contact Gwen Hennessy 714 588 1124)