Toll Road Consultants to Take a Different Route: Ask the Drivers

In a quest to better understand why ridership on the San Joaquin Hills toll road lags behind projections, toll road officials are about to try something different: asking actual commuters why they use the road--and why they don’t.

Within the next few weeks, representatives of Connecticut-based Wilbur Smith & Associates will survey toll road users in Orange County as well as those who steer toward the competing San Diego Freeway. The information will be used to help toll road operators decide whether, and how, to adopt a variable fare structure with higher tolls during peak hours.

During a workshop Thursday, San Joaquin board members were told that forecasts predicting the road’s revenue have not included surveys of drivers since 1992--four years before the toll road opened. That survey, the only one conducted, occurred in 1988.

Three years ago when the Transportation Corridor Agency sold $1.4 billion in bonds to refinance its earlier bond issue, officials decided not to use the old surveys nor to conduct a new one. Instead, the Wilbur Smith firm relied on computer models to make its traffic projections.

The rationale, officials said, was that the toll road had been in operation for only a few months and drivers’ habits had not been formed.

A survey of drivers “may have given us a misleading result,” said Ed Regan, a Wilbur Smith & Associates vice president. “It may actually have been worse than not having the data at all.”

The traffic forecasts completed in 1997 predicted 16% more traffic than currently uses the toll road. But that’s an improvement over predictions made in 1992, which were 40% above current traffic.

Still, Wall Street rating agencies have recently expressed doubts about the toll road’s revenue, prompting TCA officials to set aside $40 million in savings to guarantee bond payments.

Tom Bradshaw, an investment banker with Solomon Smith Barney, the lead underwriter on the agency’s refinancing in 1997, said on Thursday that Wilbur Smith traffic forecasts was simply one component of the refinancing package.

“The market access was never better,” Bradshaw said, adding the agency obtained interest rates of below 6%.

The lack of ridership surveys “was not perceived as a major flaw” by Wall Street analysts who reviewed the bond issue and by investors who purchased the bonds, Bradshaw said.

The results of the new $90,000 ridership survey should be delivered to the agency in May, officials said.

“This is a way to know our customers,” explained Colleen Clark, chief financial officer of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor.