Joe Hall has worked for the City of Santa Cruz since the 1970s. He watched the city double in size to over 60,000 people. He helped it recover from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But he never saw the Highway 1 bridge over the San Lorenzo River get built.
Hall, who now works part-time as economic development manager since retiring, says the bridge, at 57 years old, is almost as old as he is. It’s one of the oldest in the state’s highway system, in fact, and a pier at the center of the overpass sometimes collects debris during heavy flooding.
It didn’t take long for a vote on the future of the bridge at a city council meeting last month to morph into a discussion about what causes congestion. The plan would add two northbound lanes and one southbound lane to accommodate projections from eight years ago that traffic flows will reach 100,000 daily trips by 2035. But will Santa Cruz ever reach those levels? Some politicians have their doubts.
Before the meeting, councilmember Micah Posner had emailed Hall two graphs showing that traffic has gone down steadily across the bridge as traffic volumes have gone down since 2002—from 68,000 daily trips to below 60,000 in 2011—and Posner presented them at the meeting.
“This corresponds closely to gas prices,” Posner said of the decline. “When projects go on for this long, I think it behooves us as a community to step back and say, ‘well, are we really going to have more traffic?’”
Posner is skeptical about adding more lanes to a highway if traffic doesn’t demand it.
After much discussion, councilmembers unanimously approved further study of a replacement bridge, to the tune of about $11 to $12 million. Before they did, Hall said gas prices affect errands, but not how people get to work.
“The prime factor is jobs,” Hall says. “Gas prices probably cut down random trips, but they have to be pretty severe.”
Jobs vs. Gas
County Supervisor John Leopold, who represents Live Oak, isn’t involved with the bridge over the San Lorenzo River, but he says some are overstating the role the economy plays in traffic.
“I think that’s a selective reading of the data. The data clearly shows gasoline prices having an effect,” says Leopold, a commissioner for the Regional Transportation Commission. He’s been a vocal critic of the $500 million plan to widen Highway 1 to accommodate increased traffic.
Leopold notes that traffic declined at a steady rate from 2005 to 2011, up and down Highway 1, a period when gas prices climbed near $5 a gallon in California for the first time.
Hall notes, however, that traffic remained high in years of strong economic growth.
“There really are a number of economic factors that play into this,” Hall says. “No doubt: if gas prices went up to $7 or $8 a gallon, you would drop car volume down. But at some point, you’ll reach the point where car volumes reach capacity no matter what because it was designed so long ago.”
It is hard to reconcile the many vastly different transportation studies that delve into what causes traffic, or the roles that gas prices in particular and the economy in general play. But expensive gas makes people buy more fuel-efficient cars, says Karena Pushnik, spokesperson for the county’s Regional Transportation Commission.
“We do know that external forces, such as the cost of gas, influence people’s mobility patterns. Do they look for cheaper ways to travel? Yes, whether those ways are getting on your bike more or getting a more fuel-efficient car, or walking to the store,” Pushnik says.
Hall and RTC engineer Kim Schultz also say high gas prices make people drive more hybrids.
Leopold hopes in the coming years the RTC board carefully weighs federal funds that could be either spent on local roads, which are some of the worst in the state, or on highway improvements.
Says Leopold: “If we can find a way to balance the interests of the local roads and the highway, that’s probably the best course.”
