Sunday, May 19, 2013

Northern California future, certain toll roads


Silicon Valley Mercury News/Gary Richards, 5/19/13.  "Toll road in Bay Area?  Highway 156 stretch a candidate."

It's just a 4-mile stretch of country road, but Highway 156 is a vital link between the Monterey Peninsula and the Bay Area -- and now it could become the first toll road north of Los Angeles.

Highway 156 proposed toll road, 4 lanes, 4 miles
Highway 1 to Highway 101
In a report released Thursday, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County says converting the outdated two-lane Highway 156 into a nearby four-lane toll road between Highways 1 and 101 could be mostly paid for by modest tolls, ranging from $1.60 to $2.50 a trip.That would cover most of the $268 million in construction costs and other safety improvements along the 156 corridor. And most of the improvements could be completed in less than a decade, compared with the current 30-year-plus time frame.

The potential impact could extend beyond the Central Coast, creating momentum to build more toll roads statewide, including over the Pacheco Pass parallel to Highway 152 and along Highway 12 through Solano and Contra Costa counties. If a Monterey County toll road makes sense, why not build more?  "Other agencies are saying the same thing," said John Ristow, who runs the highway division at the Valley Transportation Authority, which is studying a toll road along 152 from 101 to Route 99. "This type of preliminary planning of toll-funded projects in major corridors is going on all over the state."

....   Build a toll road?  "We need to do something about this problem (on 156), but our funding sources are very limited," said Debbie Hale, executive director for the Monterey County transportation agency. "Caltrans approached us and suggested we partner to evaluate the feasibility of tolling as a way to build the project in our lifetimes." Read article. 

Posted by Kathy Meeh

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

380 from San Bruno to Pacifica, now I'd pay a dollar for that!

Anonymous said...

Oh, if only. What a different Pacifica this would be. It need not have meant wall-to-wall development, but at least a balance that would even out the economic peaks and valleys we're so vulnerable to. Instead we got nothing and there's very little that can be done for Pacifica now other than hope that the hand-outs pick up again.

Anonymous said...

Our tax dollars and gas tax goes to build roads. Now they want to charge us the 3rd time.

Anonymous said...

The proposed extension of 380 would have intersected with Hwy 1 just north of Shelldance Nursery, perhaps even through a portion of it. I haven't seen the 380 plans for many years, however, I don't recall if Hwy 1 through Schoolhouse Cut (Vallemar) all the way through Rockaway was scheduled to be widened at the same time. Imagine the bottleneck today if only the 380 extension had been built.

I'm still in shock at the construction of Fassler and the demolition of the red grocery store that used to sit in the shade of a large and beautiful Cypress tree. Don't necessarily miss the store; definitely miss the tree. For those who weren't around back then, the store and the tree were just about where you finish turning east onto Fassler.

Anonymous said...

@522 oh boy, are you in the wrong place. you miss a tree replaced by a road?