Photo by Tenaya Hills

Two weeks ago, readers of the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register learned that the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) board of trustees would snuff out the pipe on which they’d all been taking hits for a decade, the pipe that produced visions of a 90-mile light-rail system that would speed workers from home to high-tech office, eliminate traffic, maybe cure cancer. Then—looped, cracked-out, coming down—they apparently saw reality. “End of the Line for CenterLine,” the Register screamed on its Feb. 5 front page. The Times took a few more days to declare the project “The Little Rail Line That Couldn’t.”

But not so fast. On Feb. 12, OCTA trustees voted to delay—not kill—CenterLine as it considers such alternatives as Bus Rapid Transit, street widening, improved bus service and even maglev lines. Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, whose city would gain the most out of the initial 9.3-mile CenterLine route, characterized the decision as a “pause.”

Running bravely against ancient wisdom, the board said it would be nuts to abandon the project after spending nearly a decade and $63 million to study and promote the trolley. Now, it has become the Pope John Paul II of light-rail plans—antiquated, infirm, slowly shrinking to a rumor of its former glory, refusing to die.

But what’s the alternative? What we have now sucks. No one wants to ride the bus, domain of the ethnic and poor. Rail choices such as the Metrolink, while successful, occupy pathways originally set up to benefit ranches and farmers back in the day when there were ranches and farmers. Building new roads and freeways costs billions and, given our state budget, will probably never happen. And hover bikes? Still a fantasy left for The Simpsons.

So, whether the CenterLine is dead, suffering a Pythonian flesh wound or, as OCTA’s website puts it, basking in eternal “sunshine,” one thing’s certain as we read the morning paper while idling on the 22 freeway: we’re boned. (Gustavo Arellano)

A is for Alert Besides not leaving your house, the best way to avoid traffic in Orange County is to surf the net. There are two great websites that provide free, up-to-the-minute traffic updates for Orange County freeways. Both use color-coded symbols to represent the various levels of congestion you might encounter. Green is fast-moving, yellow is stop-and-go congestion, and red is parking lot. But let’s not forget gray, which is the symbol for “We’ve got no fucking idea because our website isn’t working right now.” That’s a common color on the California Department of Transportation’s traffic-alert website: www.dot.ca.gov/dist12/D12_tmc/webmap/d12map.html. For more accurate traffic updates, try Cox Communication’s superb Orange County area traffic site: www.cox.com/OC/cci/traffic/oc_frame.asp. (Nick Schou)

B is for Broadwater, Bruce Freeway traffic—at least in North OC—has no greater friend than Garden Grove Mayor Bruce Broadwater. In October 2003, Broadwater sued OCTA, trying to force the agency to widen his city’s freeway underpasses and on-ramps. Broadwater’s lawsuit stopped all work to widen the 22 freeway. In July, OCTA settled the lawsuit so that work on the freeway could go forward more quickly, and on Sept. 22, the agency held a press conference and ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the start of actual construction. At the event, Broadwater employed a vaguely sexual reference to brag that his lawsuit had forced OCTA to spend state money on his city’s freeway underpasses. “OCTA bent for us and kept bending and kept bending and kept bending,” Broadwater said. “Our lawyers kept saying, ‘Bruce, you’ve got enough, you’ve got enough.’ I said, ‘We can go a little further, you know.’ . . . But uh . . . it’s really gonna make the flow under the freeway great, as well as the flow on top of it.” Broadwater’s remarks betrayed his true goal: not to improve the flow on the 22—which would benefit his future constituents—but to take as much money away from that effort to improve traffic in Garden Grove, which is an even worse traffic nightmare than the 22, thanks to Broadwater, who squandered the city’s street-widening cash on traffic-generating hotels. (NS)

C is for CenterLine “The CenterLine might just be the best thing to happen to Orange County since sunshine,” says OCTA’s website, and ain’t that the truth because sunshine burns!? Originally proposed in 1992 as a 90-mile light-rail system that would eliminate traffic forever, it instead became a $63 million metaphor for a county in love with the automobile. Cities didn’t want it, fearful it would eliminate valuable automobile lanes; conservatives argued that the CenterLine was “social engineering” designed to eliminate every American’s right to the road (see “Greenhut, Steven”) and would cause more delays than alleviate congestion. Incredibly, the OCTA’s own studies continually bolstered the opposition’s argument: one gem recently uncovered by longtime CenterLine crank Jack Mallinckrodt revealed that while the CenterLine would supposedly eliminate traffic by 43,000 person-miles per day, additional traffic caused by its construction would ultimately increase traffic along rail-throughway streets such as Bristol Street by a whopping 156,000 person-miles per day. Leaving aside the question of what the hell a “person-mile” is, here’s a layman’s translation: your currently leisurely drive up Bristol will soon resemble Baghdad on a Friday night during Ramadan. Little tidbits like that caused cities to ditch the project in droves. As a result, CenterLine shrunk from 90 miles in 1992 to 32 miles in 2001 to 9.3 miles in 2004 to bubkes today. (GA)

D is for DUI Don’t get one. If you already have one, you know exactly what’s going on. Don’t fucking get one. You will owe so much money, you will be so inconvenienced, you will hate it. It’s fucked. The AA meetings. The mandatory MADD appearance. The court appearances and alcohol classes. That shameful state of being in which you’re terrified you’ll be exposed to the world as a hopeless, pathetic drunk only to realize there are so many people so more successful/prosperous and together than you going through the same exact bullshit. Don’t get a DUI. Because if you fuck up and get a second, your life is really shit. For a very long time. The first one is hard enough to deal with. The second will fuck you like nothing next to falling in love with a lying whore will fuck you. If you drive and if the cops stop you and test you and you have a blood-alcohol content of more than 0.08, you’re getting a DUI, Jack. So don’t get a DUI. How? Simple. Don’t fucking drink and drive, asshole! (Joel Beers)