TRANSPORTATION : Tollways Will Make Things Worse : The answer to traffic woes lies in ride-sharing alternatives, not in pay-per-drive roads built in pristine areas.

In the classic comic farce about the future entitled “Sleeper,” Woody Allen emerges from a time capsule to discover to his astonishment that junk food, saturated fat and cholesterol are all prized as health foods. Here in Orange County, the Transportation Corridor Agencies, the proponents of the San Joaquin Hills, Eastern, and Foothill tollway projects, have upstaged even Woody Allen. Building a network of major highways through undeveloped areas in car-congested Orange County, claims the TCA, is actually good for air quality and the environment.

The TCA’s claims would get a good laugh in a Woody Allen-style farce about Southern California, except that these tollways are no joke for Orange County and areas downwind. If they are built, tens--if not hundreds--of thousands of additional cars will be accommodated in a basin that is already choking with automobile-generated smog. The TCA’s proposed tollroads will cost billions and will determine the path of Orange County’s developmental and environmental future for well into the next century, if not permanently.

If history and the experience of Orange County’s neighbor to the north are any guide, the construction of these tollways will ultimately worsen the quality of life in Orange County and perpetuate the land-use patterns and auto dependence that make Southern California’s air quality and other environmental problems so difficult to solve. The only real long-term solution for auto-dependent Orange County and Southern California is to recognize and control its addiction to the single-occupant automobile, and to invest in transit and car-pool alternatives.

None of these alternatives has been seriously considered by Orange County transportation planners. Indeed, the TCA has even refused to build the special lanes for transit and car-pools that were originally planned for the tollway alignments.

In their place, the TCA proposes to adopt a “toll pricing” strategy where market incentives will encourage the use of car-pools and transit. Although both the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the South Coast Air Quality Management District approved of the pricing approach in concept, justifiable concerns were expressed that low income groups would bear the brunt of the hardships such pricing schemes will impose.

In a region with no transportation alternatives to the auto, a pricing scheme will create hardship for low-income groups. No meaningful amount of increased transit is planned near the Orange County tollways, and the special transit ways planned for these routes have been jettisoned.

Moreover, the scant studies available concerning pricing feasibility assume base tolls as high as $80 to $90 per month for a commuter ($2.00 to $2.15 per entry). None of this revenue will be earmarked for transit or other alternatives; instead, every penny will go to pay interest on high-yield junk bonds used to finance construction of these highways designed with the single-occupant auto in mind.

Where toll pricing is imposed on some routes and where parallel freeways are available, price-sensitive individuals may simply continue commuting on the congested freeways. Any regional air quality benefit from congestion pricing would be illusory, since the existence of the tollway would facilitate increased overall car use and more auto-dependent development, while congestion would never be relieved on the parallel freeways.

In Orange County, imposition of a pricing scheme on the San Joaquin Hills, Foothill and Eastern tollways may simply displace congestion back onto Interstate 5 and the San Diego Freeway.

In an accommodation to the powerful major landowners and developers who stand to benefit from construction of the tollways, highway-specific congestion pricing was approved by regional agencies, despite the fact that the regional effects of a toll pricing strategy on air quality have never been analyzed. The TCA has never demonstrated that such a scheme would actually result in increased passenger ridership in fewer vehicles for the region. Employing such a new and controversial strategy without analysis of its regional effectiveness simply cannot be justified.

Highly flexible toll pricing schemes also demand strong institutional checks to prevent manipulation and abuse. In the case of the Orange County tollways, the TCA must convince investors in these toll revenue-financed highways that enough motorists will pay a toll to use them to redeem unsecured, high-risk bonds.

At the same time, the Transportation Corridor Agencies are trying to persuade air quality and transportation planning agencies that the toll scheme they adopt will sufficiently induce people who would otherwise pay full fare into transit and car-pool alternatives to comply with state and federal air quality and transportation planning law. A more pointed conflict between entrepreneurial and public policy goals is difficult to imagine.

Exclusive high occupancy vehicle lanes and increased transit near existing development, not high-priced tollways in pristine areas, are essential to solve Orange County’s worsening congestion and environmental woes.

Toll schemes without transportation alternatives will not cure us of our auto-dependence; instead they will divide us further into a society of haves and have-nots.

We do not need a Woody Allen-style time capsule to peer into Orange County’s future; decisions are being made that are defining that future now. Sadly, these decisions are based not on a balanced view of social policy or sound environmental analysis, but on the politics of real estate development.

As we look to the next century, the people of Orange County deserve more far-sighted, equitable, and thoughtful solutions to the problems brought on by 20 years of haphazard suburban sprawl.