OCTA Offering Relief for 'Rail Rage'

By DAVID HALDANE

April 14, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Orange County motorists for years have been pounding their dashboards in frustration over the delays caused by trains.

“I run into it all the time,” said Dr. Howard H. Frankel, a Huntington Beach physician who travels countywide. “You’re sitting there at the crossing and the train is just creeping across, creeping back, creeping across. . . . It makes me very angry. I worry about rail rage.”

Now the Orange County Transportation Authority wants to do something about it. The agency predicts a 270% increase in traffic delays by 2020 at railroad crossings caused by the increased volume of both cars and trains. The proposed solution: spend $151 million to build tunnels under or bridges over the county’s 12 most critical crossings.

“It’s been a growing concern throughout the county with the delays that people are dealing with at rail crossings,” OCTA spokesman John Standiford said. “When you consider the increase in rail and car traffic, this becomes a major priority.”

The railroad crossing in most need of improvement, according to the report, is the one at Sand Canyon in Irvine, which could be fixed with an undercrossing for $12.4 million.

That’s if the money were available.

“None of the funding has been identified at this point,” said Kurt Brotcke, a transportation analyst who worked on the report. “This is simply a plan for long-term improvements, not a budget, not a funding document and not a commitment to provide money. This is a solution that we see to the traffic delay problem at these grade crossings.”

Presented to the transportation authority on Monday, the report follows one released in 1996 that studied 15 miles of track paralleling or intersecting Orangethorpe Avenue in north Orange County. That study recommended building bridges over six crossings, plus various street improvements and one street extension.

The new study looks at 47 miles of track carrying 37 Metrolink and Amtrak trains each day through Anaheim, Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin and Irvine. Each weekday, the study says, about 780,000 cars drive over the tracks at 51 crossings. Improving the 12 most critical of them, the report concludes, would shave about 175,000 hours off the 214,918 hours Orange County motorists in 2020 can expect to spend waiting for trains to go by.

“When you’re looking at this many cars a day,” Standiford said, “it’s a significant issue.”

Even if the money were available today, Brotcke said, it would take about a year to complete each of the 12 proposed projects, though some could be completed simultaneously. That wouldn’t be soon enough for the legions of Orange County drivers who say they’ve been suffering for years.

“It really was a problem,” said Evelyn Hardiman, 79, who is retired now but used to drive to work every day. “If you went out to lunch somewhere and got stuck behind one of those long freights, you were late getting back to work. It was very discouraging.”

Sue Ellis, a day-care provider based in Trabuco Canyon, experiences the same thing on many a day. “It can be very frustrating,” she said, “especially if it’s a very long train. Sometimes they go down, then back up again. It can really be a pain.”

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Train Delay

The 12 most critical rail crossings in the county are in need of overcrossings or undercrossings that would cost more than $150 million. Here are the locations, ranked on a cost/benefit basis, with costs in millions:

Rank: 1.

Location: Sand Canyon Avenue, Irvine, between Trabuco Road and Irvine Center Drive

Cost: $12.4

Rank: 2.

Location: Jeffrey Road, Irvine, between Trabuco Road and Irvine Center Drive

Cost: 15.3

Rank: 3.

Location: Grand Avenue, Santa Ana, between Chestnut and McFadden avenues

Cost: 14.4

Rank: 4.

Location: La Veta Avenue, Orange, between Montgomery Place and Lemon Street

Cost: 11.7