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Urgent Memo: Widening Highway One Still Won’t Work
The Campaign for Sensible Transportation has sent out a memo to voters, urging them to oppose the widening of Highway One in Santa Cruz County.
DATE: November 2015
TO: The Voters of Santa Cruz County
FROM: The Campaign for Sensible Transportation
SUBJECT: Widening Highway One Still Won’t Work
In 2004, we led the County-wide opposition that decisively defeated a sales tax increase to widen Highway One. Since then we have actively supported numerous transportation improvements around the County, including the long push to get local public ownership of the 32-mile rail corridor stretching across the County. And we have continued to resist wasteful investment in the outdated thinking behind widening highways.
Now it’s back. A new 30 year transportation sales tax measure proposed for 2016 could fund useful and environmentally sound improvements. Unfortunately, the current proposal would waste more than $100 million dollars on widening Highway One.
But widening Highway One STILL won’t work. Repeated scientific studies have shown that expanding busy freeways just encourages more traffic, so they soon become congested again.
Here’s the tiny benefit the Caltrans Environmental Impact Report estimates that the current plan to widen Highway 1 for Auxiliary Lanes will get us:
“[This plan] would result in a very slight improvement in traffic congestion” when compared to no highway expansion.
And besides costing millions of our tax dollars, the Caltrans Environmental Impact Report estimates that the plan would result in an annual increase in greenhouse gases of 25% compared to no highway expansion.
What does work to decrease congestion and prevent global warming over the long term?
A state of the art, county-wide light rail with trail system, combined with a stronger transit system, bikeways and safe routes to schools, and badly needed repairs to our existing roads. These improvements should have top priority for our tax money.
Please attend the Regional Transportation Commission’s meeting at 9:00 AM, Thursday, November 19, at the Vets Hall on Front Street in Santa Cruz next to the downtown Post Office. If you can’t attend, you can email the Commission at <info [at] sccrtc.org>.
Tell them to forget about wasting money widening the highway and to get on track with a system that works.
The Campaign for Sensible Transportation
PO Box 7927, Santa Cruz CA 95061
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there won't be any cars to drive on Highway 1. Make Highway 1 a public transit/electric rail corridor.
It'll just become increasingly expensive so no one will want to use it for fuel. Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said fossil fuel was like burning furniture to stay warm?
In another generation, we'll have driverless cars so we can watch youtube and post on facebook while commuting and it'll all be powered by solar cells on the roofs of our homes.
In another generation, we'll have driverless cars so we can watch youtube and post on facebook while commuting and it'll all be powered by solar cells on the roofs of our homes.
Sure whatever. Let's do nothing. Ever.
Isn't that the hallmark of conservatism? Hmmmm
Oh I love hypocrisy.
Isn't that the hallmark of conservatism? Hmmmm
Oh I love hypocrisy.
Our culture has evolved around the automobile and gone from smaller scale livable communities with local jobs and commerce, to a suburban model that requires an automobile for nearly every task, work, school, shopping.
Rather than feed the system that traps us in high costs and traffic might we begin to invest in alternatives? The highway is an important transportation artery and needs to be maintained, but a healthy future for our citizens will result from our investment in more bike and pedestrian access and in expanding public transit, especially passenger rail, which would become a second way in and out of our communities that would be totally immune to traffic problems.
Visit our site and facebook page!
http://www.facebook.com/coastalrail
Rather than feed the system that traps us in high costs and traffic might we begin to invest in alternatives? The highway is an important transportation artery and needs to be maintained, but a healthy future for our citizens will result from our investment in more bike and pedestrian access and in expanding public transit, especially passenger rail, which would become a second way in and out of our communities that would be totally immune to traffic problems.
Visit our site and facebook page!
http://www.facebook.com/coastalrail
For more information:
http://www.coastalrail.org
From Gary Patton:
Yesterday, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission discussed how best to convince Santa Cruz County voters to raise local sales taxes to fund transportation improvements. I have links to the Commission’s agenda packet at kusp.org/landuse. Presumably, voters aren’t going to raise their taxes unless they think they’re going to get some benefits, and one of the big items on everyone’s wish list, according to the pollsters who did a poll last May, is reducing congestion on Highway One.
I have no doubt that the polling is accurate about that concern. There is a problem, however. Identifying the priority doesn’t really tell us how to achieve the goal. If we had $113 million dollars to reduce Highway One congestion, which is what is being suggested, could we spend that money in a way that would, in fact, reduce congestion? As I noted last week on the Land Use Report, highway widening (seemingly an obvious solution) doesn’t really work. After a highway is widened, more people use the highway, illustrating what is called “induced demand.” The congestion stays just about the same. Money spent, but no progress made.
Really to reduce congestion, we need to reduce the number of vehicles on the highway at peak times. That means we need to find a way to share rides, through transit and other mechanisms. Learning to share, not more money, per se, is what can solve our problem.
http://blogs.kusp.org/landuse/2015/11/16/sharing-rides/
Yesterday, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission discussed how best to convince Santa Cruz County voters to raise local sales taxes to fund transportation improvements. I have links to the Commission’s agenda packet at kusp.org/landuse. Presumably, voters aren’t going to raise their taxes unless they think they’re going to get some benefits, and one of the big items on everyone’s wish list, according to the pollsters who did a poll last May, is reducing congestion on Highway One.
I have no doubt that the polling is accurate about that concern. There is a problem, however. Identifying the priority doesn’t really tell us how to achieve the goal. If we had $113 million dollars to reduce Highway One congestion, which is what is being suggested, could we spend that money in a way that would, in fact, reduce congestion? As I noted last week on the Land Use Report, highway widening (seemingly an obvious solution) doesn’t really work. After a highway is widened, more people use the highway, illustrating what is called “induced demand.” The congestion stays just about the same. Money spent, but no progress made.
Really to reduce congestion, we need to reduce the number of vehicles on the highway at peak times. That means we need to find a way to share rides, through transit and other mechanisms. Learning to share, not more money, per se, is what can solve our problem.
http://blogs.kusp.org/landuse/2015/11/16/sharing-rides/
Want To Widen A Highway? Or Not?
Highway widening projects are always controversial. They cost a lot of money, of course, and they generally have pretty significant environmental impacts. The issue that I think is most often coming to the fore, nowadays, is a question about whether such highway widening projects actually accomplish anything positive, in terms of reducing highway congestion.
In other words, while spending many millions of dollars and causing large impacts to the environment might be a good tradeoff, if the end result were significantly less traffic congestion, those huge expenditures and negative environmental impacts look a lot less attractive if the end result is no significant improvement at all in the highway congestion problems that were the reason that the widening project was undertaken in the first place.
In fact, highway engineers are coming to the conclusion that widening highways results in what is called “induced demand,” which means that the new capacity from the widening project is quickly consumed by more people using the highway, so it’s the same old congestion, but with more people caught in the jam.
The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission is proposing a project to widen Highway One in Santa Cruz County, from Morrissey Boulevard to Larkin Valley Road. An EIR process is just beginning. You are invited to get involved, and can get more information at kusp.org/landuse.
http://blogs.kusp.org/landuse/2015/11/09/want-to-widen-a-highway-or-not/
Highway widening projects are always controversial. They cost a lot of money, of course, and they generally have pretty significant environmental impacts. The issue that I think is most often coming to the fore, nowadays, is a question about whether such highway widening projects actually accomplish anything positive, in terms of reducing highway congestion.
In other words, while spending many millions of dollars and causing large impacts to the environment might be a good tradeoff, if the end result were significantly less traffic congestion, those huge expenditures and negative environmental impacts look a lot less attractive if the end result is no significant improvement at all in the highway congestion problems that were the reason that the widening project was undertaken in the first place.
In fact, highway engineers are coming to the conclusion that widening highways results in what is called “induced demand,” which means that the new capacity from the widening project is quickly consumed by more people using the highway, so it’s the same old congestion, but with more people caught in the jam.
The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission is proposing a project to widen Highway One in Santa Cruz County, from Morrissey Boulevard to Larkin Valley Road. An EIR process is just beginning. You are invited to get involved, and can get more information at kusp.org/landuse.
http://blogs.kusp.org/landuse/2015/11/09/want-to-widen-a-highway-or-not/
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