irvine

OCTA staff listened to a proposal at a recent Transit Advocates of UC Irvine meeting in which they asked for better OCTA transit service. 40 students attended this session along with OCTA planner Gordon Robinson and OCTA CEO Will Kempton.

OCTA has already made some improvements to UC Irvine's transit service. A little over a year ago, OCTA planners re-allocated trips to include more southbound 79 buses to relieve standing-room only conditions during peak commute hours. OCTA also made permanent a detour that serves UC Irvine's core students and Gottschalk Medical Plaza better (see below). Plus, they've recently added UC Irvine as a station for their future rapid bus system in their proposed long-range transportation plan.

Here are OCTA's permanent re-routings. They now serve the core of campus better, serving the School of Medicine, Gottschalk Medical Plaza, Beckman Laser Center, the Trevor School of Arts, the athletics center, and the new humanities building directly. 

But TAUCI believes more should be done. Currently, 27,600 students (not including staff) attend UC Irvine. OCTA's line 79 is the only bus line that runs through UC Irvine on weekends — every 80 minutes — and students have no regular daily bus routes that connect to the airport, Amtrak, or Metrolink stations. According to TAUCI president David Weinreich, they also discussed:

• Needing larger buses on route 175 to people due to frequent pass-bys and late buses
• Using advertising on bus stops to pay for desperately-needed schedule info
• Needing to have routes 70 & 90 meet at Culver — instead of Tustin Metrolink Station — to require one less wait & transfer for students coming to/from the route 79 (the most commonly used route by students).
• How OCTA's plans to boost Metrolink service is useless for UC Irvine students because of UC Irvine's distance from a station. TAUCI stressed that bus rapid transit lines would be much more preferable to frequent Metrolink service.

Their presentation included some useful facts like these:

What I think should even be done: OCTA should fold that (and may I editorialize) useless Newport Transportation Center into UC Irvine's hub. These two hubs compete for buses, and there will be a much higher demand for OCTA buses this coming year because UC Irvine will house another 1,500 or so students in new housing units, and Newport Transportation Center has no transit-dependent population nearby.

Route 1 — perhaps with a combination of the anemic route 76 — can serve to pick up the meager boardings in Newport Beach.

Having route 57 run to UC Irvine will give students access to Angel Stadium, an Amtrak/Metrolink station on weekends (okay, a 10-minute walk to Anaheim Station), UC Irvine Medical Center, South Coast Plaza, and Costa Mesa's clubs. WOOT.

Having route 1 run to UC Irvine will give students and Irvine residents a one-seat joyride to all of the beaches Orange County has to offer: Long Beach, Seal Beach, Sunset Beach, Huntington Beach Pier, San Clemente Pier, Laguna Beach, and Dana Point Harbor. Folks coming from Central Orange County have to transfer to the 1 anyways, so why not expand this to a transit-dependent population: UC Irvine students?

What do you think? Crazy idea? It's not going to cost *that* much money to re-route some buses, but will there be a trade-off for non-students? read more→

OCTA CEO Will Kempton will meet with the Transit Advocates of UC Irvine — and, tentatively, UC Irvine's Parking & Transportation folks — to discuss a possible routing of line 57 with UC Irvine to connect with South Coast Plaza and UC Irvine Medical Center, weekend service on line 59, late buses, and how OCTA can coordinate with the Anteater Shuttle and the Irvine Shuttle.

Thanks to Chad Eun Kim for permission to post! read more→

• Where: UC Irvine Student Center's Emerald Bay, rooms D & E.
• When: Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 3:30pm-4:30pm

This Saturday, February 20, 2010, Metrolink's hosting a Lunar New Year event at Irvine Station, with free entertainment, including a traditional Lion Dance. Plus, the first 100 guests will receive a complimentary Metrolink round-trip ticket.

For more information, visit www.OCTA.net/Lunar2010 . And, to keep updated on this event, as well as future Metrolink events, become a fan on Facebook/OCMetrolink. 

You can still take OCTA 86 to Irvine Station before OCTA cancels that route on weekends. That's pretty much your only weekend bus option. read more→

LAX is launching new Flyaway express bus service with no stops between Irvine Station and LAX for $25/ride. That's over 50 miles of travel.

This press release was sent out earlier last week. I just caught wind of this. From the press release: read more→

I know this is a bit of old news, but the Irvine Guideway is officially dead. On the California Department of Transportation's website: read more→

The Irvine Shuttle ("the i") has shrunken considerably. The 3-route bus system serves the westernmost part of Irvine (the "Irvine Business Complex"), but as of last Monday, city staff cut one of the routes and eliminated all midday service. They've also started charging for non-Metrolink riders. According to irvineshuttle.net, the "City of Irvine [will now focus] on its busy morning, late afternoon and evening commuter routes to the Tustin Metrolink Station."

It seems like the Irvine Shuttle now serves as a redundant duplicate of OCTA's StationLink service. The current Irvine Shuttle service combined with OCTA's StationLink Route 472 and 473, essentially mimics the same stops as OCTA's previous Routes 470 and 471 before they got "streamlined" in 2008. For comparison purposes, I've highlighted those routes in light blue on the map here.

The cuts came a few days after an Orange County Register article featured local resident Eric Hall's iShuttle Twitter feed and Youtube video about the empty buses. The article interestingly states:

While city leaders may be scaling back expectations for the iShuttle, they showed no signs of backing off dreams of a city-wide transit system.

Irvine Co. officials on Tuesday presented the council with the results of a 30-year-transit study the developer was required to fund in return for city approval of the final Irvine village.

The draft plan calls for a rubber tire transit system linking transit centers, job rich areas and residential neighborhoods.

The proposed transit plan calls for the continuation of the iShuttle, the addition of routes from the Irvine Train Station linking up to the Irvine Spectrum and the Great Park, and four new routes from the Tustin Train Station to residential neighborhoods. Officials estimated the programs eventual price-tag at $254 million.

This is the learning process we are doing, and it takes a little investment in time and money," Mayor Sukhee Kang said. "We are not looking for a year or two; we are looking at 30 years."

The city has already laid the financial groundwork for a city-wide transit system, with the council in January backing a $120 million deal with the Orange County Transportation Authority., freeing up money previously tied to the failed Centerline project, which would have linked Santa Ana, Irvine and Costa Mesa, and a now sidelined rail and bus system between the Irvine train station, the Spectrum and the Great Park. read more→

The financial "doomsday scenario" now has a deadline: June 2010.

OCTA just posted a dedicated section of their site outlining their cuts and explaining the budget situation. They have a list of 59 routes that they say they may curtail service on or are considering for outright elimination. Let me break it down for you. I modified their system map with these cuts (click on the image to the left; 400 kb PNG file). A summary of potential cuts:

• 59 bus routes may be cut, along with...
• All 24-hour service
• All "community bus" service
• Nearly all community shuttles
• Nearly all intra- and inter-county express buses

Santa Ana, for example, will find a lot of their bus service cut, leaving behind a skeleton of local service for the transit-dependent.

It's now impossible to get to the airport:

But I think, worst of all, it's now impossible to get to and from UC Irvine. OCTA may eliminate lines 59, 79, 175, 178 (along with 213 and 473), stranding students, faculty, employees, and, well, making the UC Irvine U-pass useless.

Of course, that's my interpretation of what OCTA posted. I've pasted the summary from OCTA's page. Got any thoughts? Make sure you send your comments to them! read more→

UC Irvine's weekly student newspaper, The New University, published an op-ed highlighting one UC Irvine's student viewpoint on OCTA's bus service cuts. Minhquan, a 5th-year journalism student, takes the 29 and 178 from Huntington Beach to UC Irvine each day. Republished here with Minhquan's kind permission.

OCTA Cuts Leave Riders Stranded

by Minhquan Nguyen - Volume 42, Issue 23 - Apr 06 2009

When the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) posted its annual report for 2008, the figures seemed promising for the county’s central transportation agency. Despite sharp increases in the price of gasoline – or, perhaps, because of it – bus rider-ship reached an all-time high of nearly 69 million, a very decent figure for a county as car-obsessed as ours.

Yet despite the growth of riders, OCTA continues to face budgetary stresses, which are exacerbated by the Great Recession sweeping the country at the moment. It should be understood that in addition to the bus system, OCTA is responsible for the improvement of streets and highways as well as improving the service of Metrolink rails within the county. Although OCTA draws funds from fares, tolls, interest on investments and federal support, most of the money in its 2008-09 fiscal budget comes from its own reserves (28 percent), state sources (23 percent) and local sources (29 percent). The latter two sources are largely derived from a state quarter-percent sales tax and a county half-percent sales tax, which were, respectively, originally estimated to total almost $400 million out of a $1.06 billion budget. read more→