Call Center Company in Irvine, CA

OC commuter and Redditor /u/MarcusGordathian shared absolutely headshaking dashcam footage from earlier last month (April 10, 2025) to the /r/IdiotsInCars subreddit showing a driver, possibly DUI, in a Nissan Altima illegally passing in a breakdown shoulder moments before rear-ending an innocent driver, causing a multi-car collision.

Check out the dashcam video embedded below with the original Reddit thread linked here.

The incident happened on a stretch of the 5 before an exit onto Lake Forest Dr. (Exact location on Google maps linked here.)

OP’s dashcam footage starts with a rear POV showing our Nissan Altima driver approaching a car in the slow lane and, instead of passing on the right like a sane driver, the Altima driver dips into the emergency lane, sideswiping his car into a guardrail in the process.

Careening at full speed, the Altima driver then keeps accelerating forward, slamming into an innocent driver in a red car.

That sends the innocent driver spinning into parallel traffic, causing them to what looks like get hit by a driver in a full-size truck.

Ultimately, the Altima driver gets spun around before coming to a stop, with the innocent driver who got hit ricocheting to the far left side of I-5.

Thankfully, the approaching traffic was driving defensively enough to miss the driver who got hit, slowly coming to a stop in the breakdown lane.

OP clarified that the innocent driver and their passengers were OK.

“Surprisingly, they are (uninjured.) No serious injuries.”

OP also responded to a comment asking if it was a medical emergency, making an educated guess.

“Unlikely (a medical emergency.) The CHP didn’t tell me much, but they said the video “Cleared up inconsistent statements.”

“WOW complete disregard for human life. The person should never be able to drive again..insane,” /u/SuckaFree703 commented.

“Thanks for having video of this and for giving it to CHP. That driver is a threat to the lives of others and should have permanent revocation of driving privileges,” /u/Fun_Telephone_1165 added.

“I feel like Orange County is on this sub every day,” local /u/Double_Dang commented.

This definitely falls under reckless driving, with violators in California facing up to 90 days in jail, a $1,000 fine before all the fees, or both.

Where will the land required to help Orange County meet its housing needs come from?

Irvine Co. suggests one of its golf courses may be part of the solution.

The real estate giant is seeking permission from the city of Irvine to build 1,500 single-family homes on what is today the Irvine Co.’s Oak Creek Golf Club.

The plan would create the company’s 23rd residential “village” and include another 1,600 apartment units on neighboring land previously slated for office buildings. The plan would also include a new school – with the developer paying the construction tab – that would replace a small office complex nearby.

Irvine Co. is beginning the government approval process for its 235-acre Irvine Spectrum District Village concept. The land is between Jeffrey Road and Sand Canyon Avenue, just south of the 5 freeway, not far from the Spectrum’s office and shopping hub. The first public discussion of the plan is slated for May 13, when the backbone of the planning – a “memorandum of understanding” between the developer and city – will be debated.

State homebuilding mandates have increased the pressure on all cities to build, especially high-density rentals. Irvine Co. officials estimate it could theoretically build roughly 3,500 apartments around the site that’s part of the city’s inventory of housing possibilities. Instead, the developer is pursuing its village concept, incorporating 3,100 housing units with various lifestyle amenities such as parks, pools, paths and traffic improvements.

The city will get more than extra housing. Irvine Co. proposes to pay the city up to $96 million in various fees. The developer would also give Irvine up to 2,000 vouchers for two years of heavily discounted rents at Irvine Co. apartments. The city estimates it’s a $72 million boost to the city’s affordable-housing efforts for its financially stressed residents.

Mike Carroll, the Irvine council member for this part of town, is encouraged by the proposal.

“Planning the Irvine way is about parks, schools and transportation,” Carroll said. “This proposal appears to strike a good balance. It will be carefully reviewed to ensure consistency with those master planning principles that make Irvine one of America’s great cities. I’m excited to have this project moving forward in my district.”

Irvine Co. expects it may take up to 18 months to go through the planning process. If approved, this would be Irvine’s first new village since Eastwood began in 2016.

“It will be one of Irvine’s most conveniently located communities,” Jeff Davis, Irvine Co. senior vice president, said. “Within biking, or even walking, distance to employment and support services within the greater Irvine Spectrum area.”

Less than traditional

The city has expanded rapidly. Irvine’s population grew 34% in the 10 years ending in 2023, the fastest among the nation’s big cities, according to StorageCafe.

But that popularity comes at a cost. The city’s housing affordability ranked 19th worst among 300 large U.S. cities, according to WalletHub.

Yet, creating cheaper housing options is challenging. Places to easily develop new residences in Orange County are rapidly disappearing. So, construction is pushed to less-than-traditional spots, like shopping centers or office complexes.

Ponder what Irvine Co. is currently developing.

There are 1,261 apartments on former retail spaces at Irvine Marketplace. Leasing should begin by year’s end. Another 896 rental units are being built on land previously designated for offices off Barranca Parkway near the Spectrum.

Also, 585 apartments and 83 for-sale houses are coming to the Los Olivos neighborhood, once the site of various entertainment venues.

Plus, the last part of Orchard Hills – a new high-end neighborhood with 520 homes – will begin selling soon.

The final putt

Why was the 193-acre Oak Creek golf course facility, which opened in 1996, deemed expendable?

Well, the private course is a pricey place to play, with green fees that can run above $200 a round. And it’s more likely to be used by out-of-towners than Irvine residents. By the way, Irvine Co. intends to run the golf course until any building plans are finalized.

Additionally, converting golf courses to other uses is a national trend.

Oak Creek was part of golf’s U.S. building boom from the 1990s through the mid-2000s that added roughly 3,400 golf facilities across the nation, according to National Golf Foundation. The Great Recession ended that expansion, with 2,000 golf facilities since cut nationwide to just under 14,000 as of last year.

To help negate Irvine’s loss of open space from redeveloping the golf course, Irvine Co. also proposes donating to the city its avocado groves and nearby land in northern Irvine. The avocado business will generate cash for the city. The additional land would increase the size of a planned nature preserve in that neighborhood.

The course’s signature tree-lined border will remain, becoming a landscaping frame for the new village. And when the final putt is made, the developer plans to leave the clubhouse to serve as a community center for the new village.

That’s part of the message Great Park Chairman Mike Carroll plans to deliver on Tuesday evening, May 6, during a State of the Park address in front of an expected crowd of more than 2,000 people.

For years, the park has been defined by acres of sports fields and its signature big orange balloon that gives passengers an aerial view of Orange County.

But many more signature amenities are coming to the park in the years ahead — about $1 billion worth, in fact — and Carroll wants to tell you about them.

“Tuesday’s the day we let everyone know we’re a lot more than a balloon and some sports fields,” Carroll said, “We’re a major metropolitan park on the build.”

“Behind these fences,” he said during an interview at the park Monday, pointing to a large construction zone by the Wild Rivers water park, “is a world-class park taking shape.”

Irvine calls that area under construction the “Heart of the Park,” meaning that if you’ve been to the Great Park at all, you haven’t seen anything like what it could become.

In all, the Great Park — at the site of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine — will be more than 1,300 acres.

It’ll be bigger than San Diego’s Balboa Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and New York City’s Central Park.

Yet, visits to the Great Park probably haven’t felt that significant. That’s because only a fraction of the park has been developed.

Carroll acknowledged in an interview Monday that building the Great Park got off to a “bumpy first couple of years” and that Tuesday’s event is a “bit of a reboot.”

Orange County voters approved the idea for a central park, nature preserve and multi-use development at the site of the former air base back in 2002. That plan won out over an idea to convert the base into an international airport much larger than John Wayne Airport.

Over two decades, private developers have built up thousands of units of housing around the park, but the city has been slower to bring amenities into the park itself.

Carroll, who in 2019 joined the Irvine City Council, which oversees the park, said the dissolution of redevelopment agencies in California in 2012 caused financing issues, which in turn caused delays.

Then, after the city recovered from that to develop the sports complex and related amenities, including the 5,000-seat soccer stadium home to the OC Soccer Club, the coronavirus pandemic “really put everything on hold for a bit,” he said.

Nevertheless, Carroll believes the park’s doldrums are behind it, and a golden age of construction lies ahead.

“Each and every major metropolitan park in America took decades to come to life,” Carroll said. “I’m excited that it’s officially go time for the Great Park.”

Financing for the park comes from community and redevelopment-related funds, city bonds and a community facilities district tax levied on residents near the Great Park in the Altair, Cadence Park and Novel Park neighborhoods.

Currently, the city of Irvine is building out 800 additional acres of the park, adding 22 acres of cascading lakes with waterfalls, islands and a shorefront restaurant to which diners will be able to boat up to or paddle up to in canoes.

Nearby will be a 10,000-person-capacity amphitheater, set to open in 2028, which will replace the temporary Great Park Live venue that opened last year and will become a sort of “Irvine Meadows 2.0,” Carroll said.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to have many of our citywide events and graduations here,” he added as staffers explained how the dug-in nature of the amphitheater and the placement of buildings will help insulate the sound from nearby neighborhoods.

On the other side of the lakes, the city plans to add an arboretum and botanical garden, a veterans memorial, a retail center and, eventually, a central library.

“Every great city needs to have a great library,” Carroll said.

A part of the park known as the cultural terrace, which broke ground last year, will become home to the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum, the Pretend City Children’s Museum, the Orange County Music & Dance school and a forthcoming Asian American history museum.

These spaces will open over the next few years, with the city working to launch many of the venues by the time the Olympics come to Southern California in 2028, Assistant City Manager Sean Crumby said.

“It’s such a diversity — museums, parks, retail, sports — it’s tremendous,” Carroll said. “I think this can be the finest metropolitan park in America.”

Tuesday’s event — at Great Park Live — will showcase all these attributes in virtual reality, but the biggest tech draw is something else entirely. It’s the chance to step inside a Whoosh cable car, the centerpiece of what could become the park’s futuristic transportation system.

In April, the City Council approved entering into negotiations with Swyft Cities to build an autonomous elevated cable transit network that could ferry visitors around the park.

Dubbed the “Whoosh” system, cars in the battery-powered aerial transit system can reach up to 30 mph and could eventually take people from the nearby Metrolink station across the 4-mile-square park in a matter of minutes.

The Whoosh system has not been built anywhere else in the world, but another pilot project is underway in Queenstown, New Zealand.

While Irvine has only just begun to negotiate with Swyft Cities, both parties have expressed interest in a deal where Swyft Cities would front the cost for the initial segment of the park’s Whoosh system in exchange for naming it as “the transportation module for the Great Park.”

The initial segment would connect the park’s visitor center to The Canopy retail area, a stretch estimated to cost almost $10 million and that could move nearly 3,000 people per hour, co-founder Clay Griggs said.

Griggs said the Great Park system could eventually include 12 stations and move up to 10,000 people per hour around the entire park.

The city would need to spend an estimated $40 million more to make that happen.

At an April council meeting, Crumby said the city has looked at other transportation options for the park, such as trams, people movers and bus circulators. The Whoosh system, in early estimates, would be cheaper and less disruptive to existing ground infrastructure, according to city staffers.

Representatives from the company, as well as from the forthcoming Great Park museums and the Anaheim Ducks (due to their connection with Great Park Ice), will all be at Tuesday’s family friendly showcase.

The city of Irvine will move forward with its review of plans to build 3,100 homes on and around the site of the Oak Creek Golf Club, but nothing will be set in stone for quite some time.

The City Council unanimously approved a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, this week with the Irvine Company to continue a city analysis of the developer’s proposal to eliminate the golf course and a nearby office complex to build what City Manager Oliver Chi said could be Irvine’s last traditional “residential village.”

The Irvine Co. has built 22 such villages across the city, from Turtle Ridge in the south to Orchard Hills in the north.

City Attorney Jeff Melching compared the MOU to a “roadmap” for the city to use in its review. It could take up to a year before the council ultimately decides whether to approve or deny the plans.

“To me, this is not going to be too hard to decide,” Councilmember Melinda Liu said before her yes vote on Tuesday night. “We are voting on whether to have a plan.”

As part of the proposal, the Irvine Co. would transfer more than 300 acres of open space near Portola Springs, including 250 acres of orchards, to the city for preservation, as well as commit to building a school in the new neighborhood and to issue 1,000 two-year vouchers that would provide 65% discounts off market rate on Irvine Co. apartment units.

The new development could include 1,500 single-family homes and 1,600 apartment units.

The city would also receive more than $90 million in community benefit payments over eight years to finance transit, urban forestry, food security, nonprofit support, bike center operations, trail and park improvements and funding for other city priorities.

“It has taken 50 years to get to 5,100 affordable housing units in this city — 50 years,” Mayor Larry Agran said. “In my State of the City remarks, I said we needed to double that number in the next five years. With stuff in the pipeline and this MOU — or something like it including an instant affordability program, we can get to 10,000 affordable housing units.”

More than 80 residents filed requests to speak on the Oak Creek project at Tuesday evening’s council meeting. Many spoke in opposition to losing the golf course. Others supported the push for more housing.

City Manager Oliver Chi said the proposal is an important initiative for the council to contemplate to meet state-required housing mandates and facilitate the production of housing.

In August, councilmembers adopted a new comprehensive general plan update that identified where 57,656 new units of housing could be built to meet the state mandate.

The Oak Creek community falls within the Irvine Spectrum planning area, one of three locations where the city plans to facilitate most of its new housing developments. The other two are the Irvine Business Complex and around the Great Park.

Jeff Davis, Irvine Co. senior vice president, said at Tuesday’s meeting that first occupancy could be somewhere “between 24 to 36 months from now” if the project is approved.

“It’s a long review process,” he said, “And we do feel that this plan does represent a strategic convergence for Irvine’s longstanding master planning principles in terms of community benefit and the city’s commitment to addressing local housing needs.”

Bringing the power for a second straight game, the Anteaters connected for five home runs Sunday, eliminating Arizona State 11-6 in the Los Angeles Regional of the NCAA baseball tournament.

Needing to win four straight games to advance to the super regionals after losing to Arizona State on Friday, UC Irvine is halfway to its goal.

Alonso Reyes — who had just one home run in 2025 entering Sunday’s game — ripped a two-run home run off of Sun Devils starter Derek Schaefer in the fourth inning. Later in the inning, after Arizona State coach Willie Bloomquist went with Lucas Kelly out of the bullpen, Chase Call cleared the batter’s eye in dead center field for a two-run home run to give the Anteaters a 6-1 lead.

“That’s kind of been the calling card from our offense really all year,” UC Irvine coach Ben Orloff said. “There’s a little more swing and miss and strikeouts in there than we would like, but we got a lot of guys that can change again with one swing.”

UC Irvine took a 7-2 lead in the sixth when Call launched a changeup over the heart of the plate from Sun Devils closer Cole Carlon beyond the left-field wall.

Call’s two home runs weren’t the only examples of the Anteaters’ power at the plate.

UC Irvine star center fielder Jacob McCombs connected for a no-doubt home run (423 feet, 106.5 mph) for the second straight day in the third inning, lifting the ball over The Jack and Rhodine Gifford Hitting Facility in right field. McCombs, an All-Big-West First Team honoree, leaned back in the batter’s box after his home run, taking time to admire his go-ahead blast.

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Even when the Sun Devils threatened — scoring three in the sixth to make it a two-run game — James Castagnola replenished the lead with a two-run home run in the seventh. UC Irvine forced Carlon — who entered the game with a 2.73 earned-run average — from the game. He conceded a season-high five runs (four earned) across 1⅓ innings.

Plenty is still up for grabs for the Anteaters, but it will now require more of the same offense — and taking down UCLA twice (once Sunday night and on Monday) to extend their season. Luckily for Orloff, he preserved most of his pitching staff thanks to redshirt sophomore left-hander Ryder Brooks’ start.

The brother of former UCLA pitcher Jake Brooks made himself at home at Jackie Robinson Stadium, tossing 5⅓ innings of five-run ball, giving up six hits, walking four and striking out three with low-slot delivery. It was Brooks’ longest start since a complete-game shutout of Hawaii on April 19.

“I think all year long, it’s just one pitch at a time, trying to get a zero when our offense puts up runs,” Jacobs said, adding he didn’t “save the team” with his start. “Give it to the defense and the team, we were able to come away with a win. That’s big.”

But Orloff disagreed.

“I’m really proud of this guy with that start,” Orloff said. “And we needed a long start to have a chance. We’re trying to manage this thing, not just to win the game in front of us, but we’re trying to win a regional. So that start that he gave us was huge.”

Orloff dipped into his bullpen for just two relief pitchers. Ricky Ojeda, the Big West Pitcher of the Year, tossed 1 ⅓ innings on 34 pitches. Over the last three days, Ojeda has thrown 74 pitches — and would be on just a few hours rest if he pitches Sunday night against UCLA. The Anteaters split their midweek season series against the Bruins earlier this year.