Quick Take
A major makeover for one of Santa Cruz County’s main east-to-west arteries is nearing completion after about two years of construction, with largely technical aspects moving into final testing. The county will hold a ribbon-cutting event for the project following the completion, but it has not yet chosen a date.
A multi-faceted transportation project on one of Santa Cruz County’s busiest roads is expected to finish up at the end of the year as crews test some of the road’s new features before full implementation.
Having been in the planning stages for three years before it broke ground in early 2024, the project, called the Soquel Drive Buffered Bike Lane and Congestion Mitigation Project, puts together an array of new features to make the main east-to-west artery safer for cyclists and pedestrians, while also making bus routes along the road more efficient. The work involves 5.6 miles of Soquel Drive from La Fonda Avenue in Santa Cruz to State Park Drive in Aptos, which is considered the busiest section of the road.
The $30 million project includes 2.7 miles of buffered bike lanes, which are lanes separated from cars by wider striping that gives more room for cyclists, as well as 2.4 miles of protected bike lanes which involve a barrier – or in this case, white bollard-like delineators – that separate the cyclists from cars. For pedestrians, the project introduced upgrades to the sidewalks and crosswalks in the area, including work that made 100 ramps compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The overhaul is essentially a combination of all aspects that local road projects have been prioritizing in recent years. Santa Cruz Metro’s major network changes are designed to double ridership and greatly improve the system’s reliability and punctuality; the Coastal Rail Trail is inching along despite funding concerns; and the Highway 1 expansion project adds new partial bus-on-shoulder lanes and bicycle/pedestrian overcrossings.
Tiffany Martinez, spokesperson for the county’s Community Development and Infrastructure department, said the new adaptive traffic signals, which crews are currently testing, are the main components that still need to be finalized. By the end of the year, those should be fully functional and will change color based on the real-time traffic volume – and turn green when they detect buses, with the goal of reducing public transit times and incentivizing locals to ride the bus more often.
Martinez added that all of the physical work is now done, including sidewalk and roadway construction, drainage and striping work and bike-lane installation. However, anyone who frequently travels Soquel Drive will likely have noticed that some of those new delineators that form the separated bike lanes are missing. The county has taken notice, too.
“It stems from a myriad of different things – it can be drivers running into them in areas where there’s a turn, or where people are exiting the road,” she said, adding that county maintenance crews are in the process of reinstalling the delineators where they have been knocked out of their places. Although there are no design changes on the table currently, that’s possible should problems continue.
“Those are major components of this project, so we’ll definitely be open to learning what could be improved throughout,” Martinez said. “This could be an opportunity for us to think of a different way to improve that aspect.”
Martinez said the county will hold a ribbon-cutting event for the project once it is complete, but a specific date is to be determined.
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