Widening Highway 1 in Santa Cruz: an expensive mistake
 The
Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission's Plan to widen
Highway 1 assumes that it will reduce traffic congestion and allow
us to move more freely between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. This
wishful thinking ignores the Commission's own consultant's estimate
of only a two to three-minute decrease in commute time in that corridor.
It also ignores the recent study by the City of Santa Cruz that
states that it is impossible to build our way out of congestion.
There is no way to build roads fast enough to keep up with the
growth in both the number of cars and the miles they travel.
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Is it really worth half
a billion dollars to shorten commute times by 2 or 3 minutes?
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Besides the fact that widening won't solve the problem, there are
many other reasons to vote on November 2 against spending more than
half a billion dollars of our sales tax money on this quixotic quest.
It doesn't make sense to spend half a billion dollars on the widening
project when the Environmental Impact Report for it has not been
completed. We don't know for sure what the negative environmental
impacts of the project might be. But we do know the following:
o Residents downwind of the increased exhaust fumes from two more
gridlocked lanes would suffer greater exposure to carcinogens and
asthma-causing pollutants. A recent study showed that risk for childhood
cancers increased sixfold in households adjacent to roads carrying
20,000 or more vehicles/day. (Highway 1 carries over 100,000 vehicles/day.)
o More vehicles on the highway means more vehicles will be traveling
to and from the highway on our local streets such as Soquel, Morrissey,
Water, High, Bay and Mission Streets.
o Using so much of the public's local tax money to widen Highway
1 makes it more difficult to fund other needs such as schools, law
enforcement, parks, UCSC access-even earthquake recovery.
o The area around the 41st Avenue and Bay Avenue interchanges in
Capitola will be transformed into a 12-lane wide sea of concrete,
including planned new on and off ramps.
o Construction will not be completed until after 2017. During construction,
congestion will surely be worse than it is now.
o Noise from the highway will increase with more capacity. Extensive
soundwalls will bounce this noise into new, unknown areas.
o Highway 1 is a State Highway, with extensive non-local use. Its
widening should be funded using state and federal funds, not with
local sales tax dollars.
Is it really worth half a billion dollars to shorten commute times
by 2 or 3 minutes? We think not.
The Campaign for Sensible Transportation, a local group, is leading
a strong effort to defeat the ballot measure. The Santa Cruz Group
of the Sierra Club is a participant in this campaign. The goal of
the campaign is to achieve a more than 50% NO vote on the ballot
measure to put this fiscally irresponsible idea to rest and allow
the county to pursue more sensible transportation strategies. The
Campaign needs your help; our opposition is well funded.
To learn more about why widening Highway 1 will not work, visit
http://sensibletransportation.org.
To volunteer or contribute in other ways, call the Sierra Club office,
426-4453.
The Sierra Club supports transportation policy and systems that
minimize the impacts on and use of land, airspace and waterways,
minimize the consumption of limited resources, including fuel, and
reduce pollutant and noise emissions. To read the complete transportation
policy of the Club visit www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/trans.asp.
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