Tram design wins OCC students award

Danette Goulet

ORANGE COAST COLLEGE -- Imagine being able to just hop on a nice new

tram and be whisked out to the front gates of Disneyland -- or perhaps

down to the Wedge.

The design of this vision won four OCC students $5,000 and an Award of

Excellence in an international architectural design competition this

week.

The four second-year students -- Jack Kato, 20, Dave Esparza, 23,

Nicholas Holmes, 21 and Jen Semans, 19 -- captured first place Wednesday

night in one of six categories of competition, beating out a team of

professional architects from Hong Kong.

“This is what we’ve been doing in class. Now our work has been

accepted in society,” Kato said of the honor.

The “Changing the Face of Orange County” ideas and design competition,

sponsored by the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the Orange

County Council of Governments, was created to generate ideas, designs and

discussion about ways to handle the growth in Orange County.

The competition brought in 40 entries from three countries and six

states throughout the nation.

The ecstatic students designed a light-rail transit system that would

run all the way from Anaheim to the end of the Balboa Peninsula in

Newport Beach.

The rail would run the length of Harbor Boulevard, making 29 stops and

linking six cities. Passengers could expect the aesthetically pleasing

trams to come by every 10 minutes, Holmes said.

It would travel through some areas where there is still room for

development, making new areas of attraction possible, the students said.

On the peninsula they would remove the center divider and the parking

meters along the length of it.

“The idea is to get people out of their cars,” Esparza said. “If you

work in Anaheim and you want to go out to lunch, you don’t even have to

get in your car. For tourists, you can go to Disneyland or down to the

beach and not worry about traffic or getting lost.”

The students’ instructor, Rose Anne King, assigned the contest as a

class project, hoping that students would come up with and complete

“tolerable entries” in time for the deadline.

“I was blown away by how tenacious they were,” she said.

King also gave glowing reports of the end products produced by the

foursome’s classmates.

Competition organizers kept the students’ design to use as a model for

government officials, policymakers, developers, property owners and to

allow the public to see the opportunities to improve life in Orange

County.

“I know, for myself, I would love it if this really existed,” Holmes

said.