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(E-mail ALL the OCTA Board Members by clicking HERE.)
At the June 25 OCTA Meeting, Santa Ana Mayor-for-life and OCTA Director Miguel Pulido made a cryptic comment about financing his quarter billion dollar Santa Ana trolley project. He predicted that a financing plan would be feasible after the August decision on the 405 toll lane project.
What could these two projects possibly have in common? Was Pulido actually expecting that building toll lanes on the 405 would generate revenue for his pet gentrification project that would move visitors from Santa Ana to Garden Grove?
How much money did OCTA think they were going to rake in? This is never discussed in their phony outreach meetings as they devote their efforts to pretending that Measure M authorized toll lanes and that the toll lanes are being considered only because they have greater capacity and will move more cars. None of their spin doctors ever talk about some gigantic windfall that would give them a slush fund for their pet projects.
Yet, that’s exactly what their internal studies predict.
OCTA commissioned a report from toll road revenue consultant Stantec in September, 2009. That first report predicted so much revenue that OCTA ordered a second Phase 2 toll revenue forecast to update traffic counts and add in economic modeling to reflect the drop in traffic as the economy had contracted and gas prices had risen.
The second Stantec report evaluated four different options, including toll lanes with no intermediate stops between the 73 and the 605, and the effects of using free carpool lanes with 2 or more passengers vs free carpool lanes with three or more passengers.
The 3+ option that OCTA is now peddling as Alternate Number 3, predicts annual toll revenue rising from $71,527,000 in 2020 to almost $93,000,000 by 2047. Over the thirty years projected in the Stantec report, the total projected toll revenue is over $2.1 billion. You don’t need advanced mathematics skills to figure out that the $2.1 billion in toll revenue is a lot more money than the $300 million in additional costs that would be needed to demolish the Fairview bridge, add the extra toll lane through Costa Mesa and set up the surveillance and accounting systems to collect the tolls.
There’s a lot more that you can figure out if you drill down into the numbers provided in the Stantec report.
As anyone could guess, increasing the carpool lane requirement from the current two people per car to three people per car drastically cuts the number of vehicles that would travel free. With a two person carpool requirement, the forecast would be that the 2035 split would be 893,287 vehicle traveling free while there would be 198,317 vehicles paying tolls. When you up the carpool requirement to three per car, those numbers flip dramatically, with 276,035 traveling free and 823,964 paying tolls. Oops, there goes that phony OCTA argument that toll lanes are equivalent to free carpool lanes.
How about that argument that the toll lanes are so much more efficient because they carry more vehicles? Well, the Stantec forecast shows that there would be 4,668,085 vehicle per year in the five free lanes, and 1,100,000 in the 2 toll lanes. Again simple math shows that on an annual basis, the two toll lanes would handle 550,000 vehicle per lane per year, while the five free lanes would each carry over 933,000 vehicles per year.
For a few peak hours per weekday in each direction, implementing toll lanes may increase capacity. Or they may not. Toll road revenue and volume projections are notoriously unreliable, especially over longer periods of time.
There’s a third implication to the numbers in the report. Projections of the number of 2+ passenger vehicles using carpool lanes indicate that an option with two free carpool lanes from the 22 to the area where the 605 free carpool lane to carpool lane connectors separate from the through carpool lane on the 405 into Los Angeles is definitely an option that should be studied as part of the review of the project. But it looks like the options under consideration have been deliberately limited so that the best option with the greatest capacity at the lowest cost has been excluded so the big money maker Alternate Number 3 looks superior.
The only thing we know for sure is that once there are tolls on the 405, the lanes will never be free again.
Oh, we also know that OCTA’s PR program is as phony as a three dollar bill. They know that the real reason behind the toll lane proposal is the prospect of raking in a financial windfall with new toll roads, starting on the 405 Freeway and gradually extending to every other freeway in Southern California.
Maybe the voters of Orange County would approve toll lanes instead of the freeways promised in Measure M if OCTA shared their real long term plans, including how they might finance Pulido’s folly and other pet OCTA projects by selling the lanes on our freeways.
But now that we know the shell game they are playing, let’s get the message down to four words.
No Vote? No Tolls
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Our Coverage Thus Far:
- “Lexus Lanes” on the 405? Help Stop the Latest Toll Road Outrage!
- Perfect Circularity: A 405 Toll Lane for the Sole Purpose of Funding a 405 Toll Lane?
- OCTA’s Will Kempton to Betray OC Voters?
- Proposal Unites Enemies in Costa Mesa, against HB Mayor Don Hansen.
- 405 Toll-Gate For Dummies: How the proposed toll lanes are illegal.
- My Modest Proposal to build “Expensiveways” on the 405
- A Taxpayer Bailout for the Failed 73 San Joaquin Hills Toll Road?
- Seal Beach and Westminster to Join Costa Mesa in opposing 405 tolls
- OCTA expects BILLIONS in revenue from 405 Tolls!
- 405 Toll Projection – $2.95 for Three Miles!
- Cooking the Books with Two VERY different sets of numbers…
- How We Can Defeat the 405 Toll Lanes! And … Meet Your OCTA Board!
- Huntington Beach Mayor Hansen Rebuffed by his own City Council
AND NOW, somebody has created the excellent…
No 405 Tolls.Com!
E-mail ALL the OCTA Board Members by clicking HERE.
!
*Let’s see now…..the OCTA wants to take all the money from Tolls that it collects off
the 405 and put that into a general fund to pay off the billions and billions in promised pension benefits……well……you think that could not happen?
No Toll Roads…..this is California….think Freeways……Freeways…..Freeways….where
the money we pay every day for a gallon of gas actually goes to build roads, fix potholes and create NEW Freeway lanes…….
Don’t have the money Mr. and Mrs. Government? Try some TRANSFER PAYMENTS
from YOUR individual Retirement Programs to start!
This should really be read more widely and picked up by larger venues than ours. Anyone willing to join me in sharing it on social media?
Let me do that for now, it’s better if you help Inge with her press pass…
So who voted for this tax? I sure as heck didn’t and will vote against EVERY member of OCTA board from now on. They have demonstrated a grand scheme to defraud all of us.
Soon I’ll be letting you know which OCTA members agree with you and are going to vote against this. I can say, for now, Orange Mayor Carolyn Cavecche (that’s already on the record) and I have hopes for 3 to 5 of the Supervisors, possibly L Galloway, and probably eventually a majority – the more they all note the public outrage!
Sell the state and federal hiways to private firms and let them charge whatever the market will bear.
Or convert the hiways to toll roads and have the government raise the rates slowly to maxinize the pain over an extened period of time.
*Shut down all the freeways for three weeks. See how much the traffic will bear to get back on. It will look like a Mecum Auction for an original 427 Cobra! Of course you could also just restrict the traffic to Public Safety Vehicles and Bureaucrats going out to lunch.
Great coverage of this ill conceived attempt to take public carpool lanes and make them pay for use toll lanes. I am glad Costa Mesa City Council voted to denounce Option 3 to create toll roads on our 405 freeway. How many other cities will have the courage to stand up and defend the public which has paid for additional lanes with Measure M extension. I am with the comment made by Not Inmylifetime to vote against any OCTA member that is in favor of this scheme to defraud the public. Or better yet do a recall to permanently bar them from holding any public office!
I know we in Seal Beach say no, definitely no to Alternative 3. At this point, the OCTA and Cal Trans will be very lucky to even get a yes on any of the alternatives except the no build, from what I hear in the neighborhood. Many people are dissatisfied with the noise as of late. My husband works odd hours and he said one early morning he came home and he said he heard someone cussing up a storm out there. At first he thought it was a neighbor nearby but it wasn’t—it was the Cal Trans construction workers getting mad at one another. What I don’t get is that some of the work is being done at night to help with traffic that is present in the day, but if there is dust from construction being spewed out at night–what does that do to our lungs when we are all sleeping in this neighborhood by the freeway? I have had weird symptoms and my doctor is documenting it all. Who will not be a victim of this freeway work? I say enough is enough. Do what you gotta do to fix the connectors and be done with this construction. NO MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have another argument against toll lanes Mr. Quimby, that I am adding to my letter in OCTA. This one is about the fact that OCTA is claiming these toll lanes will be similar to the ones on 91 freeway express lanes that are by Yorba Linda, Riverside County. Oh really? That freeway is a mess. Whenever we have been out there, and believe me, I went out there practically on a weekly basis for my daughter’s softball games. The premise you just supposed actually happened there. Four free lanes were clogged due to the expense revenue needed in the toll lanes and SURPRISE! the toll lanes were free of trafffic–and I mean FREE of traffic. There was hardly any cars there! This was in the morning hours on a Saturday as well as in the afternoon–especially in the afternoon, mind you. And if OCTA wants to tell me its less traffic and better to have toll lanes—PUH-lease! I wasn’t born yesterday:)