The future looks bleak for socal unless population normalizes.
Ha, no way. If it's the worst place you've been to, then I can only imagine you have not been to many places. Admittedly it lacks good mass transit, but that's true of most of California (I personally would say all, because SF mass transit isn't great either, it just happens to make the rest of California look barbaric - I say this as a proud Californian). And the car culture is especially strong in SoCal. Not to mention Irvine was originally intended to be a suburban community, not a metropolis. A measure was put forth to add light rail a few years ago, but the "not in my backyard" folks voted it down.
It has 8 lane surface streets precisely because of forethought (it's a planned city, btw). Most of the north-south roads have 65 mph speed limits. You don't get that without proper planning and zoning. It operates its own shuttle service independent of the county. Then there's the high ratio of parks, green belts, wildlife reserves, and dedicated bike lanes relative to its neighbors. Demand to live there is outstripping supply, which leads to traffic, which admittedly sucks and hopefully Californians will realize you can't keep throwing more lanes at the problem. I'm in Manhattan now, and sure, Irvine can seem like a quaint provincial town in comparison, but the worst place you've ever been to? Horribly designed? Cue eye-rolling.
Intuitively one would think this decreases traffic but instead it turns the neighbourhood into a kind of watershed where all traffic quickly converges to the same few progressively broader street.
The harder the grid planner tried to inhibit through-traffic, the worse the effect.
We have a perfect (pathetic) example of this phenomenon.
Most of the older buildings in the downtown core rest along brickpave streets that are awful to drive on. Horrible for the suspension, tires, the works. I believe the insistence on keeping them is an attempt to limit through traffic from a nearby East/West interchange with the notorious Interstate-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_4#Orlando_area).
Through traffic is still a huge issue, and in addition, the poor brickpave road is constantly riddled with pot holes from the heavy trucks and sheer number of vehicles that detour through. I can't imagine what the maintenance must cost relative to regular asphalt.