Widening the Highway Leaves No Room for Sensible Transportation
In Supervisor Ellen Pirie's Opinion Piece on November 25th, she accuses the Sentinel of negligent reporting because it did not focus on the last vote of the Transportation Funding Task Force, which recommended putting a sales tax measure on the ballot that focused on widening Highway One. That's probably because it wasn't news. The outcome of the Funding Task Force was preordained from the moment that the County's Transportation Commission (which has made widening Highway One it's highest priority) appointed the task force members, then put themselves on the advisory body just to insure that everything went as planned.
This is not to say that the Task Force did not shed some interesting light on transportation. Probably the most lasting accomplishment of the Task Force was to sponsor a poll that asked county voters what kind of transportation policies and projects they would like to see over the next 35 years. Given a list of specific projects, voters polled chose road maintenance at the top, followed by several rail projects and support for the bus system. Below that were projects to amend Highway One. At the bottom of the list of "preferred projects" (number 17 to be exact) was widening Highway One from Santa Cruz to Aptos with carpool lanes. The Transportation Commission has already spent 5 million dollars planning this project.
At least as interesting as the project list are some of the principles by which voters want their transportation planned for the coming decades. A strong majority want our use of the car to be supported, while an equally strong majority want alternative transportation measures put into place to reduce our "overdependence on the automobile" and to address concerns regarding global warming. While this seems contradictory at first glance, it doesn't have to be from a policy perspective. We can, and should, maintain our existing road system, which we have not been doing. While the Transportation Commission has spent 55 million (and counting) dollars on widening the freeway near the fishhook, the county's roads are falling apart and need hundreds of millions of dollars to fix them. We could also improve the efficiency of some of these roads, (including Highway One) without widening them. In fact, the highway project that had the most support on the survey was to improve merge lanes, presumably with metering ramps—a project that may be acceptable to environmentalists.
Concurrent with maintaining our current road system, we can, and should, build alternative means of getting around to give people more choice and relieve the pressure on our road system. Of these alternatives, bike and pedestrian projects have, by far, the greatest return for the buck. Expanding our bus system is also important, although most of our bus routes act more like a safety net to the automobile—an absolutely vital one—than a really attractive choice to the car. A passenger train system could provide a regional alternative to the automobile by tying into state and nationwide train service at the Watsonville Junction, where Monterey County plans to bring CalTrain and Amtrak within 5 years.
What all of these alternatives have in common is that they will slowly have a positive effect on congestion by addressing its root cause—a socioeconomic system that is based around the automobile.
The County Transportation Commission's current fixation with widening the Highway runs contrary to principles agreed upon by the strong majority of voters recently surveyed. Highway One is the single largest source of global warming gases in the county. Widening it would increase these emissions. Anyone in doubt of this should refer to a vote of the Funding Task Force not mentioned by Supervisor Pirie in her article, in which the highway folks absolutely refused to accept meaningful language that prohibits the construction of major transportation choices that would increase our share of global warming gases—a decision that was, in the words of Santa Cruz Mayor Reily, "astounding." Because a wider highway will encourage more car use, it runs contrary to the voters desire to reduce their dependence on the automobile. Because a wider highway is the single most expensive project ever considered by the county of Santa Cruz—at some 500 million dollars including debt service—it runs contrary to the principle of balance, as doing the project would not leave sufficient resources to engage in other major projects, including a real passenger rail service (which was allocated only 35 million by comparison in the plan approved by the task force). Sadly, because a wider highway would attract more users and (over the long term) encourage growth around the Monterey Bay Area which would be based on automobile use, a wider highway would not even make it significantly easier to drive a car. Any extra space created by the wider facility would, in the medium term, be used up by the increased automobile use that a wider highway would encourage.
What is lacking more than money for transportation in Santa Cruz County is leadership. It will take leadership to address our over dependence on the automobile while insuring that our current road based infrastructure does not fall apart due to lack of attention. It will take leadership to imagine a different kind of urban (yes, urban) planning, in which we grow towns around hubs and convivial walking environments, instead of around the status quo economics of growth for the sake of growth. It will take leadership to seriously consider global warming when planning around the number one cause of it in Santa Cruz—transportation. Because this leadership is clearly lacking on the County's Transportation Commission, we will need to continue to work together to provide it to them.