Old Railways Figure in Freeway, Guideway Plan

Like business tycoons of the old West, a few people will sit around a table this month and discuss a golden opportunity to own a railroad line. But in this case, the investors are government agents. They want to pull up the tracks, not lay them down.

The meeting is being scheduled by the staffs of Caltrans and the Orange County Transit District to help decide whether they should acquire a five-mile stretch of track paralleling the Santa Ana Freeway between Katella Avenue in Anaheim and the Costa Mesa Freeway.

Meanwhile, OCTD has already commissioned design studies for future mass transit use of a seven-mile, trackless and weedy strip of old Pacific Electric trolley line purchased by the transit agency for $15 million in 1982.

It’s all part of a plan to use old rail lines in Orange County for a non-rail form of mass transit: bus and van-pool guideways, which would carry thousands of county residents each day between home and work.

Guideways are specialized ramps and roadbeds that channel so-called high-occupancy vehicles away from regular automobile traffic. Sometimes guideways are built over the median strips (center dividers) of existing highways, or on land next to the existing roadbed, separated by concrete barriers or elevated by support columns. But guideways also can be routed through neighborhoods and business districts as stand-alone structures, apart from any existing streets or freeways.

Los Angeles and Houston have had bus guideways for years. The Southern California Rapid Transit District is extending the 13-year-old Los Angeles-El Monte guideway along the San Bernardino Freeway from East Los Angeles to Union Station. More than 42,000 people daily use the existing portion of the guideway, 25,000 of them in buses, according to RTD officials. Coupled with car-pool use of the guideway, this gives the San Bernardino Freeway the highest average number of occupants per vehicle--1.6 people--on Southern California’s freeway system.

(By comparison, the Costa Mesa Freeway is averaging about 1.2 people per vehicle, even with its new car-pool lanes.)

Guideways have been planned for Orange County for some time, but they achieved higher priority after voters overwhelmingly defeated a proposed 1% local sales tax hike in June, 1984. County transportation officials had hoped to use the tax revenue to finance a wide range of highway and transit projects, including a light rail line between Fullerton and the office complexes near John Wayne Airport, with stops in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza shopping center along the way.

The tax measure’s defeat forced state and county transportation planners to reduce their immediate mass transit goals. Two months later, the OCTD board of directors voted to make guideways the key element in its mass transit strategy.

But while guideway planning has been an ongoing activity in Orange County, the proposed use of abandoned or surplus rail lines to accommodate them is new.

Top Priority Project

Although no firm decision has been made to begin guideway construction at a specific location, OCTD Director of Development Brian Pearson says at least one guideway project--on the median strip of the Santa Ana Freeway--has top priority and will be tantamount to a “sure thing” if the Southern Pacific tracks along the Santa Ana Freeway are acquired.

Transit officials want the Southern Pacific right of way adjacent to the Santa Ana Freeway not for the proposed guideway itself, but rather for expansion of the freeway from six lanes to eight lanes, with a new median strip wide enough to accommodate a guideway.

“By incorporating the guideway into the freeway expansion project, we save about half the cost,” Pearson said. He said the first guideway, which would extend from a point on the freeway near Katella Avenue southward for about five miles, would cost about $100 million, $25 million of which would be used to purchase the adjacent track bed from Southern Pacific.

If a purchase agreement is reached this fall, Pearson said, then the remaining obstacle would be to amend the environmental impact studies prepared for the Santa Ana Freeway expansion project. Widening of the freeway is expecting to begin in 1989, Pearson said.

Funds Available

OCTD has bankrolled about $155 million in mass transit funds that would be drawn upon for the first guideway project, and there is another $7.7 million available in state transit money earmarked for such projects in Orange County.

Eventually, Pearson said, the guideway on the Santa Ana Freeway would connect with guideways on the Orange and Costa Mesa freeways, or with car-pool lanes.

For example, Pearson said a bus traveling southbound on the Santa Ana Freeway from Los Angeles would go from a car-pool lane directly by ramp onto a guideway near the Katella Avenue overpass and later move via ramp directly onto the southbound car-pool lane of the Costa Mesa Freeway.

The guideway on the Santa Ana Freeway is a top priority even though OCTD already owns a seven-mile stretch of the old Pacific Electric trolley line a few miles away. That line extends from Beach Boulevard, near Katella Avenue in Stanton, to the intersection of Raitt Street and Santa Ana Boulevard in downtown Santa Ana.

Transportation officials say a guideway built on the old trolley line would be particularly useful in taking some eastbound traffic off the Garden Grove Freeway at Harbor Boulevard and channeling it directly into downtown Santa Ana, bypassing the heavily congested interchange of the Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Orange freeways.

Holding Up Development

Santa Ana officials are particularly excited about the idea, because traffic would then proceed east on Santa Ana Boulevard into the Civic Center commercial district, where restaurants and other new businesses have been spawned by city redevelopment programs.

Also, Garden Grove officials are anxious to resolve the fate of the right of way, because it is now an eyesore and is holding up planned commercial developments nearby.

But construction of a guideway on the old trolley line right of way would be more controversial, costlier and somewhat disruptive than the freeway project, since the strip, which resembles a dry wash, slices diagonally across neighborhoods and behind homes and shops. Also, such a guideway could not connect with either the Orange or Costa Mesa freeways.

Still, Pearson and other transportation officials feel confident that a guideway will be built there eventually. If not, he said, the land will be sold off for development or recreational open space.

Some businesses currently park vehicles or otherwise encroach on the strip, but they pay for the privilege, Pearson says.

“We’re making more money off of it now than it costs us to maintain it,” he added.

Alternative Plans

OCTD has hired the Santa Ana firm of Basmaciyan-Darnell Inc. to produce several design alternatives for use of the old trolley line right of way.

So far, three alternatives have been identified:

- A guideway along the entire route from Stanton to downtown Santa Ana.

- A guideway that, for a short portion of the route between the Garden Grove Freeway and downtown Santa Ana, would be accompanied by two arterial lanes not reserved for high-occupancy vehicles.

- A combination guideway and arterial roadway between the Garden Grove Freeway and downtown Santa Ana and the sale or joint development of the rest of the Pacific Electric right of way.

OCTD board members seem to favor the second and third options because they would do the most to relieve the congestion at the confluence of the Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Orange freeways nearby.