Orange County Commute

 

For current traffic conditions, go to www.traffic411.com.

Orange County rides buses, commute trains (Metrolink) and Amtrak but it lives or dies by the motor vehicle.

When the freeways and toll highways are moving, all is well. When they clog, as they often do, gloom descends on the unlucky travelers. But for many the clouds dissipate quickly.

Orange is a suburban county, filled with bedroom communities. But it is also a business county, jobs by the tens of thousands, almost all of them with a short hop to a highway.

Moreover, many Orange cities are within a drive of 10 to 20 miles of major job centers in Los Angeles County — Long Beach, Industry, Los Angeles International Airport.

Other Commute Pluses

Western and Central Orange County are mostly flat and ideal for wide boulevards. They have been built by the dozens and they move a lot of traffic.

South Orange County did not boom until after 1960. When development arrived, it came, in many instances, as master-planned communities that paid special attention (parkways) to moving traffic quickly to highway access points.

Orange County is not built over water; it has no major bridges with tollbooths. The San Francisco Bay Region is built over bays and rivers and has seven major bridges, each with a toll plaza — everyone a bottleneck.

Like San Diego County, Orange, especially on the south side, has many ravines, hills and mesas that interfere with road construction and obstruct traffic (many dead-end streets). But Orange doesn’t have nearly as many as San Diego.

Orange is compact, at 789 square miles, the smallest county in Southern California. East to west the county measures about 45 miles. No great distances separate the cities. For the most part, they flow into one another.

Highways

In recent decades, very few counties in California have built new highways. Orange is exception. Despite community opposition, it opened several toll highways that have greatly relieved traffic on the freeways.

Orange over the last 20 years has spent several billion to widen its freeways, rebuild interchanges and improve access ramps. It has also installed car-pool lanes and metering lights.

Work on the highways is perpetual. Some stretch is always being improved or widened.

Buses and Trains

Buses serve all the cities. Run by Orange County Transit Authority. Routes along almost all major streets.

Metrolink runs commute trains that connect Orange with Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties. These trains (throughout these counties) carry 40,000 passengers a day and the numbers have been increasing.

Metrolink stations are located in Anaheim, Anaheim Canyon, Buena Park (new), Fullerton, Irvine, Laguna Niguel-Mission Viejo, Orange, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana and Tustin.

Click image to enlarge

Cars and Trucks

The state in 2004 tallied in Orange County 1,924,483 cars, 422,258 trucks, 47,051 motorcycles and 130,060 trailers.

Disregarding the trailers and motorcycles, the total came to 2.3 million cars and trucks at a time when the county population was 3 million.

When you factor out kids under driving age and the infirm, you come close to one vehicle for almost every functioning adult. The 2000 census counted 1.9 vehicles for each O.C. household. (For Los Angeles, the number was 1.6 vehicles per household, for San Francisco 1.1 vehicles).

Many Californians drive solo, in some counties up to 80 percent of motorists.

Orange County Likes Cars

There’s a well, duh, quality to this assertion but it leads to another conclusion that is rarely articulated:

Despite the constant increase in cars and trucks and the frequent jams on the highways, Orange County has a commute that for most residents ranges from short to endurable.

The exceptions fall on those who have to commute long distances at peak hours. If you live in Irvine and work in West Los Angeles or downtown Los Angeles, you are going to spend an unpleasant chunk of your workday stewing in traffic.

Suggestions

• Buy a good map or map book or computer map and note the arterial parkways. When the highways are congested, try these roads. Yeah, you chug along at 30 mph and you get snared by the traffic lights, then all of sudden you’re home. Again, many people have short commutes and these arterials are often the shortest distance between two destinations.

• Stagger work hours if you can. Leave for work early, leave for home early or vice versa. Sometimes the freeways start jamming at 3 p.m.

• Car pool or buddy up with co-workers. This will get your vehicle into the speedier high-occupancy lanes. For information on car pooling, (800) 266-6883.

• Use the toll highways. Yes, they cost but if time is money, a toll road might be saving you both.

• Metrolink and buses. If they are convenient to you, try them. At the least, they will save you the aggravation of driving.

For information on buses and Metrolink trains, go to www.octa.net.

Miscellaneous

• Toll highways accept cash and Fastrak scanned by a transponder. For information www.thetollroads.com.

• Riverside Freeway (Highway 91) mixes free lanes with tolls. Must prepay to use the toll lanes.

• Some toll roads charge extra in peak hours.

• Express buses. New or on the way in a few years: along Harbor Boulevard and Westminster Boulevard and from Brea to Irvine.

• Orange County professes to hate taxes but one tax has had little difficulty getting passed — a half cent on the sales tax, the revenue earmarked for transit jobs. In 2006, residents renewed the tax for 30 years.

California laws and customs reward this tax. The thinking is that if a county passes a transit sales tax, it should be encouraged by extra money from the state and sometimes the feds.

• City and transit agencies are installing cameras and information signs that keep motorists abreast of traffic conditions. Before heading to and from work, try sigalert.com.

• If you buy a car with high gas mileage you may be able to secure a sticker that allows you to drive solo in the fast lanes. Limited number of stickers issued.

• About 30 years ago, Californians passed a tax cut that all but wiped out school busing. Since then, at the request of parents, many school districts have brought back busing with a fee for riders. Check with school district.

• Names to dread: the El Toro Y (intersection of Interstates 405 and Interstate 5) at Irvine, and the Orange Crush (intersection of I-5, Highway 22 and Highway 57) at Santa Ana. Notorious traffic stoppers but many improvements have been made in recent years.

• Ferries. Newport Beach has a few shuttling among the islands without bridges.

• Highway 1. The coastal road, pretty but on weekends and holidays, when people flock to the beaches, often congested.

• Metrolink runs vacation trains to some shore cities.

• John Wayne Airport is the most convenient for most OC residents. But if you live near the L.A. border, you might try Long Beach Airport, which is becoming popular. Another choice for Yorba Linda-Brea-Fullerton, the large airport at Ontario in San Bernardino County.