In honor of the $2.5 million that the OCTA "advanced" to finally complete the flyover for the 55 <> 405 connection (Ready to fly over), let's have that section RENUMBERED so we won't forget that someone owes somebody a pile of money for messing up a concrete and steel bridge. This alchemy did turn to gold for CH2MHill and C. C. Meyers, but left us holding the bag.
OC Supervisor and OCTA member Bill Campbell must have just had it with Caltrans when he exclaimed "We've got to make sure these things don't happen in the future." Bill might also ask where the performance bond was to cover this mistake as he looks for these contractors to cough up the dough for this inexcusable engineering that’s inconvenienced everyone with lookey-loo delays for so many years.
The grander issue here, though, is how this $14.5 million, two-year delayed boondoggle provides a benefit since it's only for carpool lanes. Ray Haynes, one of the brighter bulbs in the Assembly from nearby Murrieta, had studied them and found "The average car-pool lane carries only 7 percent of freeway traffic, yet it consumes 25 percent of the capacity on a four-lane freeway. This means the remaining 93 percent of the traffic is crammed into 75 percent of the freeway space."
In 2002, the Reason Foundation, a Libertarian think tank, said "The recently released journey-to-work figures from the 2000 census reveal what many of us have long suspected: carpooling is a flop. Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars adding carpool lanes to congested freeways, carpooling declined from 13.4% of work trips in 1990 to 11.2% in 2000. Carpooling's mode share declined in 36 of the largest 40 metro areas-including highly congested Los Angeles and San Francisco."
So besides getting stuck for bad engineering, does this also mean that 7% of us will benefit from what 100% of us paid for?