In March three weekend bus routes will be cancelled in Mission Viejo. Routes 82, 85 and 86 will be trimmed as part of a countywide reduction is bus service due to a $330 million budget shortfall at the Orange County Transportation Authority.
Route 82 (map) runs between Foothill Ranch and Laguna Niguel, passing through Mission Viejo on Santa Margarita Parkway and Crown Valley Parkway. It has stops at :
- The Shops at Mission Viejo
- Saddleback College
- Saddleback College Medical Center
- Trabuco Hills High School
- Portola Plaza
- Mission Viejo Church of Christ Park-and-Ride
- Pinecrest Park
- Melinda Park
- Mission Hospital Regional
- Medical Center
- Children’s Hospital at Mission
Route 85 (map) travels between Mission Viejo’s Trabuco Hills High School and Dana Point, passing along Marguerite and Crown Valley Parkways, serving the following stops:
- Portola Plaza
- Trabuco Hills High School
- The Shops at Mission Viejo
- Mission Hospital Regional
- Medical Center
- Newhart Middle School
- La Paz Intermediate School
- Mission Viejo Church of Christ
- Park-and-Ride
- Saddleback College
- Mission Viejo/Laguna Niguel (Metrolink Station)
- Vista Del Lago Park
- Lake Mission Viejo
- Aurora Park
- Casta Del Sol Golf Course
- Recreation Center
- City Hall
- Library
- Children’s Hospital at Mission
Route 86 (map) runs between Mission Viejo and Costa Mesa, traveling in MV on parts of Los Alisos, Madero, Jeronimo, Marguerite, LaPaz and Jeronimo, serving stops at:
- Kaiser Permanente
- Oso Viejo Community Park
- Newhart Middle School
- La Paz Intermediate School
- World Cup Soccer Center
- Norman Murray Community Center
- Mission Viejo 1-Stop Center
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is too bad. It makes Mission Viejo even less mobile for those who can’t afford a car, are disabled, or are a teenager that can’t afford to drive from being able to get around the city.
I really wish Mission Viejo had a decent bus system like Santa Monica has with Big Blue BUs, Culver City does with Culver City Bus, or Pasadena has with ARTS.
Orange County has made the big mistake to not regard public transportation as a vital, necessary and basic tool for transportation.
I was informed that the main reason for cuts to the public transportation offerings is that it is funded to a large extent by sales tax revenues. Why, I ask you, would anyone fund a basic means of transportation largely by a type of revenue that is first to diminish in tough times? This is ludicrous! Why further, I ask, is OCTA not proactive and working on changing the way public transportation is funded in our County rather than crippling it?
It has been proven time and again that public transportation wins ridership gradually and over time. However, because of how public transportation is being funded in Orange County, it is not being offered on a consistent basis. As a result, our residents cannot commit to using it as they cannot rely on it being there next quarter!
The sorry state of Orange County’s public transportation system is a direct result of it being funded largely by excess sales tax revenues. Its lack of success is a self-fulfilling prophesy! Instead of reducing service in tough times, OCTA should increase service. It would help increase ridership and help residents choose public transportation over their car. Increasing service in times like these would increase ridership that would to a large extent continue using public transportation when times get better because by then they have learned to value its other, non-financial, benefits. If Orange County was serious about public transportation, there would be no reason why any household would need a second car.
I’d be interested in what means people would suggest to fund transit modes such as buses and trains.
Many studies have shown that, with a few committed exceptions, most low income riders only ride transit until they can buy their first car. On the other hand, many people with better than average financial means are perfectly happy to take the 80% subsidy for their train trips on Metrolink, despite the average income of those riders exceeding $70,000.
OCTA barely manages to recover 20% of costs (including capital) for the Metrolink and bus systems. If we want to fund transit using the fare box, fares would have to rise by 5 times or more.
We already pay more sales tax to fund transit than we should. Even though less that 0.2% of all passenger-miles are served by transit, we allocate nearly 25% of our sales tax (Measure M) for transit.
Let’s hear some concrete proposals that can actually support a transit system in Orange County, identifying funding mechanisms, the amount of tax revenue expected, and the costs riders would be expected to pay.
We do not allocate 25% of our sales tax to transit. We pay 1/4 of 1% as voter approved sales tax to fund measure M which by the way is one of the most successful localy managed transit projects.
Re John’s comment: As near as I can tell, about 25% of the prior Measure M was allocated for transit. This same percentage was maintained in the revised Measure M, which is a 1/2 cent per dollar sales tax – not 1/4% as John stated.
I’m not sure what measure of success he is using, but to me spending 25% of a tax collected to improve local mobility on just 0.2% of the passenger miles traveled per day, is unfair and inequitable.
By any cost/benefit measurement, OCTA is doing a terrible job of spending taxpayer money in decreasing delays due to congestion for the vast majority (99.8%) of the population.
If OCTA is to be effective they need to have the ability to bypass the traffic they’re trying to get rid of. This means dedicated bus lanes and traffic lights that are synchronized to never make them wait. If instead buses are treated like cars on the road, then of course they’ll take very long getting from one place to the next. The more Mission Viejo caters to cars the more our traffic situation gets worse. It’s quite pathetic how bad our traffic is considering how few people we have. In downtown Copenhagen, one bike lane (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYajXN4pPHI) that is slightly narrower than a car lane puts through 115 bikes/minute which is then a capacity of 6900 bikes per hour. It takes Mission Viejo more than 4x that much pavement to move the same amount of people through. Say what you will but cars are very space inefficient and any effort to promote cars in favor of mass transit,biking, and walking means Mission Viejo will continue to unnecessarily have more traffic than it needs to have.
Just for fun, if we imagine Mission Viejo switching from promoting only cars to instead promoting buses, biking, and walking, we’d have buses running every 10-15 minutes and not a single road in our city would need to be more than 1 lane in each direction. But so long as we love our cars, then we can continue kissing our green space, bike lanes and wide side walks good bye.
It’s ironic that Mission Viejo considers itself such a safe city when most parents don’t even feel safe letting their kids walk across town or to school. We can blame ourselves for that.