A Growing Debt : County Paying for Past Planning Errors

Walt Disney knew. And he was all but ignored.

In 1953, a Disney-commissioned study predicted that Orange County was about to undergo tremendous growth. But state and county officials only laughed when told about plans to build Disneyland in an Anaheim orange grove. Why build something like the Magic Kingdom, they asked, out in the country?

By 1955, when Disneyland opened, county officials predicted that by 1970, Orange County’s population would be 720,000. The county hit that number in 1961, nine years ahead of schedule.

Today, traffic congestion is widely considered to be out of control and 96,000 members of a new generation of Orange County residents have signed petitions to get the Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative on the Tuesday countywide ballot.

Listed as Measure A, the initiative seeks to prevent traffic from getting any worse in the unincorporated areas of the county by tying growth there to the capacity of local roads and public services to handle more traffic and increased workloads.

Regardless of whether it will work or not, proponents and critics of the measure share a belief that it’s an attempt to rectify--and perhaps avenge--planning mistakes of the past.

So who’s to blame?

Polls show that the public holds county supervisors accountable for much of the problem, but Orange County’s traffic woes started long before the current board members were elected.

And even though the initiative makes no effort to regulate freeway traffic because it can’t--the freeways are owned and governed by the state--transportation and planning experts, asked about the miscalculations that spawned today’s congestion, keep coming back to the subject of freeways. Among the points they make:

- Partly due to residents’ opposition, less than half of the county’s planned freeways have ever been built. Early on, experts say, Orange County’s conservative politicians refused to seek some state and federal highway funds because they didn’t like the strings attached.

- Planners greatly underestimated the willingness of people to drive long distances--on freeways--between home and work. Nor did planners accurately predict how many women and teen-agers would join the work force, adding their cars to the regional road system, and they overestimated the public’s willingness to use mass transit and ride-sharing programs.

- The state Department of Transportation was not allowed to consider future land uses next to freeways when designing them and until recently did not take into account a new freeway’s propensity to attract higher-density development. Planners also were too optimistic about construction schedules for three planned transportation corridors in south Orange County.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when Orange County’s freeway system was being planned, neither Caltrans nor county officials anticipated the county’s spectacular growth.

Leads the State

One result: Orange County now leads the state in the number of registered vehicles per freeway mile--13,678 compared to L.A.’s 11,218. And the county leads the state in the ratio of registered vehicles to the population--there are 1.9 million cars for 2.2 million people.

“In the 1950s” said Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, the “planners didn’t even think about connecting land-use decisions with the availability of highways, and vice versa. The Santa Ana Freeway, which opened in 1955, was designed for a county of about a million people, not the 2.2 million who live here now.”

Back then, Caltrans officials said, state policy dictated that they only consider current land uses--not future development--in the planning of freeways. And the notion that freeways attract higher-density development was still controversial and not widely accepted.

The cities are only beginning to consider the effect of their land-use decisions on the region, Oftelie said.

But in some respects, Caltrans officials said, they did their job too well.

“Early on, we got a number of new freeways in place and we got ahead of the congestion problem,” said Keith McKean, Caltrans’ Orange County district director. “In that process we went pretty fast. There was not the same concern over environmental issues as there is today. That evolved. When we proposed the Coast Freeway (generally along Pacific Coast Highway), for example, the people didn’t feel that big a traffic pressure. We were ahead of the public perception. And the public just didn’t want any part of it.”

Freeways Never Built

Other planned freeways that were never built included freeways along Beach Boulevard, Imperial Highway and an extension of the Orange Freeway from the Garden Grove Freeway to the San Diego Freeway along the Santa Ana River.

To be sure, state and county officials said, residents themselves are partly to blame for the lack of new freeways. In most cases, they say, residents successfully blocked proposed new routes. The population continued to soar.

And there were design errors. For example, Caltrans bowed to pressure from local farmers and changed the route of the San Diego Freeway so that it now fails to parallel any major street that could serve as an alternate route during freeway traffic tie-ups.

Still, said McKean, Orange County’s traffic is not yet as bad as L.A.’s.

“I know that sounds odd, but that’s my personal opinion,” McKean said. “The truth is, when the Santa Ana and San Diego Freeways were added, the amount of traffic here was not great. They probably would not have been justified. They were installed to close the gap between Los Angeles and San Diego.

“In those days, Orange County was treated very well,” said McKean, who designed the ill-fated Coast Freeway.

“Now of course, those things are overloaded, and the surface streets are getting the excess. In the north county, the streets are not designed as part of a coherent system, and in the south, there’s no road system parallel to the coast or to I-5.”

In 1971, county officials accurately predicted that without new highways, there would be a massive traffic crunch right about now. They blamed the “not-in-my-backyard” attitude of the local citizenry toward proposed new freeways. But they also underestimated the county’s population growth again, particularly in the south county.

And in the past 12 years, only 2 miles of new freeway have opened here.

Developers are still placing high-rise office buildings next to the overloaded Santa Ana Freeway, a sore point with former Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande.

“People here want low-rise, low-density construction,” Nestande said. “They don’t want another Los Angeles. But many builders come in here to make quick profits on high density and just don’t care about the problems they leave behind.”

Today, some slow-growth advocates believe development should be banned near freeways because it tends to severely congest adjacent intersections. But county planners argue that such a ban would simply increase commercial development on streets closer to people’s houses, adding to the traffic flow between those neighborhoods and the freeways.

Nestande said that in 1981 the Board of Supervisors began moving aggressively toward construction of three planned freeways--now planned toll ways--in south Orange County and was in the forefront of a national trend toward use of developer fees to finance them.

“It was clear then that we also had to do the monitoring that is necessary to phase development with new roads and other facilities.

“If a mistake was made,” Nestande said, “it was that we did not pursue monitoring earlier, more aggressively, while crystallizing the issue of phasing.”

Another factor, say county officials, is that the three planned freeways fell behind schedule due to delays in environmental studies and financing.

Still, the freeways would not have solved the problem. Indeed, even the county phasing plan for roads and development in the foothill areas above Tustin, Orange and El Toro will only provide for 70% of the needed road capacity.

The county is behind in road construction now, officials said, because the amount of traffic that would come into the county each day from adjacent counties was underestimated and because developers obtained favorable zoning decisions at a pace that far outpaced the county’s research on future needs for roads, parks, public safety services, flood control, libraries and even schools.

The result: Land use decisions were made that do not reflect current information about people’s needs.

“I’m not sure that in the early 1980s we had the tools to really understand the linkages between local land use decisions and their regional effects. For example, if you were to close down the county now,” Nestande said, “you’d still be facing up to 60,000 entitlements (approvals authorizing housing units) from previous county planning decisions.”

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, a 14-year board veteran, said he could not recall ever being advised by the county’s administrative staff that the board’s land use decisions were generating too many new homes and not enough infrastructure.

Riley said the staff informed board members that roads and other public facilities were falling behind but never came up with a recommendation that the board change what it was doing.

“I get a little annoyed by people who say we didn’t know what was happening,” Riley said. “After Proposition 13, we got nothing from the (Gov. Edmund G.) Brown Administration, we lost revenue sharing, our total financing ability changed.”

Meanwhile, Caltrans officials said they still cannot consider future land uses that may crop up next to new freeways. Local governments should be adjusting their plans to what the freeways can carry, McKean said.

Mike Ruane, the county’s top traffic planner, said: “The cities have approved too much new growth over the years without taking the freeway or regional road network into consideration. The cities treat the freeways like endless sewers.”

A 1980 study commissioned by the Orange County Transportation Commission concluded that it would be nearly impossible to construct a road system that would adequately handle expected growth by the year 2000. The report, by the firm of Parsons, Brinkerhoff, Douglas & Quaid, said it would take an investment of $15 billion to $20 billion, and even then the result would be a road and freeway network with average speeds 20% below 1980 levels.

“Everybody has learned one thing from all of this,” said Nestande, the former supervisor. “And that is you can’t slow growth by not building roads. Growth occurs regardless. And the road system must drive development, not the other way around.”