As Orange County transportation planners look to the future, they want cities to help find innovative ways to encourage motorists to forsake their beloved cars and embrace mass transit.
Cities were given $100,000 each for ideas to shuttle riders from Metrolink stations to residential areas, major employers, resort areas and shopping malls.
To the planners' chagrin, however, most cities wanted trolleys, shuttles or "fun buses" that rely on rubber-tire technology. Santa Ana wants to introduce modern streetcars modeled after Portland's popular circulator. Only Anaheim -- home to Disneyland's monorail -- has entertained the idea of constructing elevated people movers.
Why push Metrolink?
Two-thirds of the jobs and population in the county are within two to four miles of a Metrolink station, Orange County Transportation Authority officials say. .
In two years, residents will see a Metrolink train running every half-hour between Fullerton and Mission Viejo. A new bus system that stops once each mile will link the county's major east-west and north-south corridors, enhancing transit options, the OCTA said.
Commuter rail is successful in the eastern U.S. because suburbs are linked to large urban centers. Exporting that concept here is a challenge -- if not impossible -- because Orange County sprawls over nearly 800 square miles.
If transportation planners cannot move stations closer to employers and homes, they at least can explore moving riders more easily to and from stations, letting planners at the city level help create the system, OCTA officials said.
The agency is dangling $25 million to cities under its Go Local program to elicit further designs, along with the opportunity to tap into a potential bonanza of more than $1 billion for developing and building systems that link up with rail stations.
The idea is for a "seamless" system from the curb in front of homes to Angel Stadium, Mission San Juan Capistrano or Disney Hall in Los Angeles, said Paul Taylor, OCTA deputy chief executive officer.
But some of the concepts, such as streetcars and trolleys, are hardly cutting edge, say transportation consultants.
"These ideas are not innovative enough," said Roy Reynolds, a consultant for Personal Rapid Transit, an elevated people mover that runs on electricity.
