Podcast: |
Friday, November 13, 2015
Urbancincy
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.
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Former Santa Cruz County Supervisor Gary Patton talks about land use, and land use decisions, with an emphasis on public participation and how the land use process works.