Quick Take
One of the largest multimodal improvement projects in Santa Cruz County is headed to a spring completion, several months earlier than originally planned. Crews will finish the final steps improvements to Soquel Drive in the spring, to avoid weather impacts as much as possible.
Soquel Drive’s significant makeover is getting closer to its hopeful spring 2025 completion, with a majority of the big pieces almost completed.
The slew of improvements — called the Soquel Drive Buffered Bike Lane and Congestion Mitigation Project, involving 5.6 miles from La Fonda Avenue in Santa Cruz to State Park Drive in Aptos, considered the busiest section. — seek to encourage locals, visitors and commuters to bike, walk and ride the bus more often. That comes in a number of ways, like 2.7 miles of buffered bike lanes along Soquel Drive, which are lanes that separate cars from bikes with wider striping, giving more room for cyclists. The major artery will also get 2.4 miles of protected bike lanes, which include a full barrier separating cyclists from cars.
The $30 million dollar project has been in progress for about 18 months, and is on track for completion by late spring, said County Community Development and Infrastructure spokesperson Tiffany Martinez. That’s notably earlier than the initial estimate of the end of next year.
Martinez said crews have completed nearly all of the new Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant ramps, new sidewalks and flashing beacon crossings at the crosswalks along the street. Seven of eight new retaining walls are finished, with the final one still in progress.
Martinez added that crews are still working to install a fiber optic cable under the street, which will control new adaptive traffic signals along the road. Those are lights that change color based on the real-time traffic volume at 22 intersections, and will also turn green when they detect buses, in the hopes of reducing public transit times.
The exact completion time depends on the weather, Martinez said in late November. She added that crews weren’t concerned about the winter weather causing delays but were waiting until spring to add a number of final touches that are most susceptible to rain or wind, such as testing traffic signals and pavement resurfacing.
Anything that requires drying, like pouring concrete and painting, is not planned for the winter months, Martinez said.
The rest of December will largely involve completing the final retaining wall and installing fiber optic cable for the traffic signals, setting crews up for the final electrical work and system testing in the spring.
Latest news
Check out our Carmageddon road delay list here. This week, pay particular attention to:
- The on-ramp to southbound Highway 1 from Bay Avenue in Capitola has been closed since late September to allow construction crews to build a new ramp. Drivers can take a detour north on Porter Street to Soquel Drive, then east to Park Avenue, where they can rejoin Highway 1. They may also head south on Bay Avenue to Park Avenue, and rejoin southbound Highway 1 there. Caltrans expects the ramp to reopen Dec. 29, a month later than the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission’s earlier estimate.
- There will be curb and gutter work on the right shoulder of northbound Highway 1 and the northbound Soquel Drive off-ramp between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. from Monday through Wednesday.
- Guardrail work will close down sections of Highway 9 from Monday through Wednesday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Those sections are between San Lorenzo Valley High School and Lazy Woods Road, Arboleda Way and Scenic Drive, and between the 13.6 and 15.5 mileposts on Highway 9.
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