Sierra Club, local advocacy group sue Caltrans over Highway 1 widening in Aptos

Local transit advocacy group Campaign for Sustainable Transportation and the Sierra Club have filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Transportation and the state agency’s plan to widen Highway 1 in Aptos for auxiliary lanes between State Park Drive and Freedom Boulevard — Phase 3 of the Highway 1 widening project.

The project includes new auxiliary lanes — lanes that connect highway on- and off-ramps, allowing vehicles more space to merge — between the 41st Avenue and Soquel Drive interchanges, the busiest stretch of Highway 1 in Santa Cruz County. Some of those auxiliary lanes will also do double duty as bus-on-shoulder lanes, which allow buses to use the auxiliary lanes to bypass traffic.

“This project is based on the discredited belief that auxiliary lanes will reduce congestion,” Rick Longinotti, chair of the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, said in a media release. “What we need are alternatives to being stuck in traffic. Spending $180 million on a futile project diverts funds from those alternatives.”

Caltrans District 5 spokesperson Kevin Drabinski said the agency would not comment on pending litigation. However, he said that the lawsuit doesn’t affect current Highway 1 work, including this weekend’s planned 24-hour closure from Bay Avenue/Porter Street to Park Avenue, as it is focused on a future phase of the project.

Longinotti has long been critical of the project. He believes the planned auxiliary lanes will do little to alleviate traffic on Highway 1. He points to the concept of “induced travel,” which argues that expanding roads because of high traffic only encourages more traffic, leading to comparable levels of congestion. He also believes that the bus-on-shoulder lanes are not “true” bus-on-shoulder lanes because they allow bus-exclusive travel only in short sections near on- and off-ramps along Highway 1, which he says will cause buses to remain stuck in traffic during peak periods.

Longinotti said the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation is suing on “the adequacy of an environmental study.” He said the draft environmental impact report (EIR) for Phase 3 compared the auxiliary lane project with only a “no build” scenario, rather than comparing the project with alternatives.

“They didn’t study transit on the rail corridor or a real bus-on-shoulder project,” he said. “We feel like that’s a really important violation of the public process.”

He said the EIR also states that northbound traffic in the morning peak period would actually worsen. While the draft EIR says that the afternoon commute would improve in its first year, Longinotti takes issue with that, too.

“The opening year is not the year that you want to determine if this is a good project or not,” Longinotti previously told Lookout. He said he believes more cars will eventually end up on the highway, clogging commutes once again. “As soon as congestion opens up people think, oh great, now I’ll get back on the freeway.”

Longinotti also referenced former Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission Executive Director Linda Wilshusen’s comments critical of the project. In those comments, she said that the project needs will not be met — the partial bus-on-shoulder lanes will provide essentially no benefit, the reduction in vehicle miles traveled will be unnoticeable, future travel pattern modeling is inaccurate, and more.

Longinotti said if the groups win their lawsuit, they could steer Caltrans in a different direction on the future of Highway 1: “Maybe if you had a decent bus-on-shoulder program, the amount of time per traveler from Watsonville to Santa Cruz would compare favorably.”

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