A plan to unclog the intersection of highways 152 and 156 got
the hard sell Wednesday from local officials desperate to secure
state funding for a $32-million solution to a transportation
problem that has vexed travelers for decades.
Hollister – A plan to unclog the intersection of highways 152 and 156 got the hard sell Wednesday from local officials desperate to secure state funding for a $32-million solution to a transportation problem that has vexed travelers for decades.
The officials want to build a flyover at the intersection to prevent traffic from backing up all the way onto U.S. 101, as it often does on weekends and holidays. The problem is that Good Samaritan travelers on eastbound 152 stop to let westbound travelers turn on to 156, turning 152 into a parking lot and the 13-mile trip from 101 into an event that can take more than two hours.
“If you get behind a truck, forget it,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage said Wednesday. “You might as well put on your brakes and bring a lunch.”
Gage made his comments at a meeting with Barry Sedlik, California’s undersecretary of transportation, at Casa De Fruta. He was joined by San Benito County Supervisor Anthony Botelho, Gilroy and Morgan Hill mayors Al Pinheiro and Dennis Kennedy, and several law enforcement and transportation officials, all hoping to convince Sedlik that the flyover project is integral to the state’s economy and should be the governor’s highest transportation priority.
“From a congestion standpoint, it’s the worst I have to deal with in the whole region,” California Highway Patrol Captain Bob Davies said. After years of traffic snarls, the CHP dispatched five officers to write tickets and control traffic flow on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. The officers wrote 19 tickets and cited 13 Good Samaritans for impeding traffic, but Davies said they did nothing to improve traffic flow.
“We didn’t do a darn bit of good,” he said. “We can deal with it but we can’t manage it. We can’t manage that intersection.”
But the intersection is more than a headache for harried holiday commuters. Pinheiro said that bad traffic hurts business at the Gilroy outlets, and all in attendance agreed that the clogged corridor, the region’s only direct link between 101 and Interstate 5, is important to the economy of every city from Hollister to San Jose.
“It’s the major east-west corridor for truck traffic, commuters and weekend traffic,” said John Ristow, a deputy director with the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. “There’s no other route from 101 to the Central Valley.”
According to figures presented at the meeting, about 8,000 vehicles a day travel along 152 from the Central Valley. On the road’s busiest days, that number reaches 30,000. The VTA poured $4.1 million of local money into the flyover design and the environmental impact report to make it more attractive to outside funding. Ristow said the EIR may be released to the public as early as next week.
The project has been subject to the ups and downs of the California economy for several years, but lately it has been getting a lot of good news, including $15 million in federal funds promised in the spring. Last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a budget that added $1.3 billion for transportation projects, including $11.5 million for the flyover. Ristow said that if the project receives both state and federal money, the VTA will be able to divert about $6 million to other projects, including improvements at the intersection of highways 101 and 25.
The budget must be approved by the Democrat-controlled state legislature, but an alternative budget proposed last week by Assemblymen John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles, included a similar amount for transportation.
“It’s fair to say that the governor and the legislature agree on $1.3 billion to fully fund (transportation),” Laird spokesman Bill Maxfield said. “We’ll see what happens when we go through negotiations, but we are starting out in agreement.”
Now that the state money appears to be in place, Sidlek and his staff are barnstorming the state, visiting every region to determine which projects deserve to be first in line for funding.
“Every region has critical projects,” Sedlik. “When you have years of delay, with populations growing and economies rebounding, we get all kinds of congestion. We’re very pleased to have [152] high on the list of projects that are ready to get moving.”
But even if the state money ultimately comes through, the project will still be short nearly $5 million if the federal money does not. President Bush has threatened to veto the omnibus transportation bill that includes the project’s $15 million earmark, and Ristow said that it’s likely the earmark will shrink.
Ristow said that the economics of road projects are such that it will take private money to make all the improvements needed in South County and San Benito County. There appears to be some support to allow toll roads, though a bill that would do just that was recently defeated in the Assembly.
“A toll road from 101 to the Central Valley really needs to be seriously considered because there’s no other way to finance [the improvements],” he said. “And San Benito County is too small [to finance roadwork].”
San Benito County is still waiting for state and federal money for a variety of projects, including one to turn 2.5 miles of Highway 25 just south of Gilroy into an expressway that has been estimated at as much as $700 million. San Benito Supervisor Anthony Botelho said that the flyover may actually make traffic worse in San Benito County. Botelho urged state officials to take a broader approach to traffic problems to ensure that one improvement doesn’t cause trouble around the region.
“We have a number of projects in our county that will be impacted when the flyover is completed,” Botelho said. “We’ll have more traffic in San Benito and I’m not 100 percent sure we have the funding and the planning to accommodate that.”
Construction of the flyover is expected to begin in the late summer or fall 2006.
