Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Jerry Collamer expounds on the not-so-shockingly tone-deaf antics of the Orange County Toll Road Agency that will literally do anything to extend their oft-rejected SR 241 Foothill Toll Road through the backcountry wilderness and down around world class surf destination, Trestles Beach. What did Einstein say about doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results?
OC’s toll roads have a new way to make money from their empty lanes crisscrossing the county: Hundreds of dollars charged in automated fines per missed toll payment, versus a measly single-time $6-per toll. Commuters beware.
Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) CEO Neil Peterson, who was placed on leave last month, has offered to resign in exchange for receiving a hefty out-the-door payment. This from an agency suffering low toll revenues and misguided attempts to extend their roads against environmental rules and opposition.
When a pilot instructor and student emergency-landed a small plane in the perpetually-empty northbound lanes of the debt-ridden, failing-business-model 241 toll road in Orange County, California, he exclaimed: “What a waste of perfectly good asphalt.”
No matter where they’re stuck in OC’s sprawling road network: on I-5, the 405, Crown Valley Parkway, or in their own driveway — a magical toll road miles from their moribund vehicular situation will time-travel them up, to that heavenly place of commuter-bliss, where slowdowns never occur.
Orange County’s Toll Road Agency is pushing the first segment of a previously rejected road extension that will have significant and irreversible environmental and economic impacts. According to the Save San Onofre Coalition and the State Attorney General, the project had failed to undertake sufficient environmental studies. As a result, the Regional Water Board in San Diego decided to deny the project a waste discharge permit.
A movement to pave over San Onofre State Beach and Trestles with a toll-road-to-nowhere-for-nobody-but-developers was rejected by the California Coastal Commission and Federal Commerce Department in 2008. Yet, here again the State Water Boards will decide in May whether to grant a permit for the “Stupid Toll Road” to dump contaminated runoff into creeks and the ocean while keeping the dream alive of paving over Trestles.