CA 17

[Max Rockatansky]

Nice writeup!  Did you happen to find anything about the rebuild of CA 17 over the Santa Cruz Mountains after the Loma Prieta Earthquake?  I've heard reports that a lot of work had to be done to make it passable again and in the process some shoulders widened and curves eased, but I haven't been over it myself since.

Unfortunately not really.  Since the CHPW guides pretty much die in the late 1960s a lot of the lesser incidents on highways around the Bay Area after the Loma Prieta Earthquake are hard to track down information on.  Given how the Santa Cruz Mountains is essentially just loose soil it's not hard to envision landslides being an issue on all the State Highways. . 

[mapman]

I was only in junior high school in Santa Cruz when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit in 1989, so I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the damage on CA 17 due to the earthquake.  From what I heard at the time and the pictures that I saw, there were a number or landslides/rockslides and concrete median breaks on the Santa Cruz County side, as the highway crosses the San Andreas Fault west of the epicenter of the quake.  IIRC, CA 17 was closed for a few months, and the Highway 17 Express bus service (jointly run by Santa Clara VTA and the Santa Cruz Metro Transit District) was born of that closure.  (I used that bus later when I attended San Jose State University while living at home in Santa Cruz.)

Likely some of the myriad of books written about the Loma Prieta earthquake damage (especially ones centered on Santa Cruz County) should have more detail about the damage and cleanup of CA 17.

[mrsman]

I read Max's post on gribblenation and have a qn.  (Maybe it was answered in the post, but my mind may have spaced out).

It seems that since 1936, the routing from Oakland to Santa Cruz was first signed as CA 13 and at some point later, the routing became CA 17.

When did the Albany-Richmond, Richmond-San Quentin, and San Quentin-San Rafael (to US 101) portions become part of CA 17?  Were these segments part of a different highway originally and then lobbed on to CA 17?  Was CA 17 extended at the time of the construction of the Richmond Bridge?

In my mind, if this segment was not part of the original CA 13 declaration, I'm clueless as to what would cause the authorities to connect the roadway north of Richmond, with the Oakland-San Jose-Santa Cruz routing.  Since a good portion of the routing was shared by US 40 (or I-80 in later days), it would seem that the two routes are really separate.

(And even in its latest iteration as I-580, the portion north of Richmond is definitely different from the Oakland-I-5 routing of the rest of I-580, but I understand that given the desire to make the routing Interstate and given the lack of I-x80s to choose from, they would have to extend either I-880 or I-580 along the Eastshore towards Richmond.)

[Max Rockatansky]

I read Max's post on gribblenation and have a qn.  (Maybe it was answered in the post, but my mind may have spaced out).

It seems that since 1936, the routing from Oakland to Santa Cruz was first signed as CA 13 and at some point later, the routing became CA 17.

When did the Albany-Richmond, Richmond-San Quentin, and San Quentin-San Rafael (to US 101) portions become part of CA 17?  Were these segments part of a different highway originally and then lobbed on to CA 17?  Was CA 17 extended at the time of the construction of the Richmond Bridge?

In my mind, if this segment was not part of the original CA 13 declaration, I'm clueless as to what would cause the authorities to connect the roadway north of Richmond, with the Oakland-San Jose-Santa Cruz routing.  Since a good portion of the routing was shared by US 40 (or I-80 in later days), it would seem that the two routes are really separate.

(And even in its latest iteration as I-580, the portion north of Richmond is definitely different from the Oakland-I-5 routing of the rest of I-580, but I understand that given the desire to make the routing Interstate and given the lack of I-x80s to choose from, they would have to extend either I-880 or I-580 along the Eastshore towards Richmond.)

Interestingly San Rafael was part of the original route description of CA 13.  CA 13 was probably never field signed and CA 17 wasn't extended north of Oakland until 1957. 

[sparker]

^^^^^^^^^^
Back in the old SSR days, there was a bit of controversy regarding just where the signed state route from San Jose to Oakland would run.   The plans for original US 101E -- up former US 48 from San Jose to Castro Valley via LRN 5 -- were essentially set in stone (101W would use LRN 2 up the peninsula); it would then use the Foothill (later MacArthur) corridor to Lake Merritt, then twist its way to downtown to the ferry terminal near today's Jack London Square.  But that left two other parallel routes:  what would later become the surface route of SSR 17 from Warm Springs through central Fremont and Union City and on via Hesperian, Llewellyn, and Washington boulevards to downtown San Leandro (LRN 69).  But the northern extension of LRN 105 from Hayward to that same point in San Leandro also figured into the mix.  Also, the city of Alameda didn't want to be left out; once the Posey Tube was open, it wanted an SSR to serve it.   Apparently at one point -- since the numbers jumped by 4 from west to east -- SSR 13 was planned to use LRN 69 up to San Leandro, where it "bumped" into LRN 105; it would then have turned west on Davis St. (today's CA 112 but then the continuation of LRN 69) west to Doolittle, where it would trace present CA 61 north into Alameda, then back to Oakland (on present CA 260) via the tube.  East 14th Street, which hosted LRN 105 both north and south of San Leandro, was to have become the original SSR 17 as it was east of the SSR 13 corridor.  But that plan never got past the planning stage; some parties objected to the "13" number, and it was decided to jettison the dual-signage plan, stick with 17, but omit any signage along LRN 105 between Hayward and San Leandro (today's in-process-of-relinquishment CA 185) as well as through the Alameda loop for the time being -- which of course was delayed over 30 years until the 1964 renumbering.   Of course the convoluted SSR 17 path in Alameda County was obviated when the Nimitz Freeway was constructed in the '50's.   And Max is absolutely correct re the southeastern approach to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge; the Richmond city streets over which the original SSR 17 traveled weren't brought into the state network until just before the bridge opened in '57; the freeway connection next to Franciscan Blvd. up to US 101 in San Rafael was part of the overall bridge project and was effectively "new-terrain" construction.       

[Max Rockatansky]

I was able to get the 1935 Gousha Highway Map scan we've used in so many of these threads up and running again on cartweb.geography (it was down for about a month).  It lends evidence to what Sparker stated as CA 17 appears to utilize LRN 69 through Alameda whereas US 101A is shown on LRN 105:

http://cartweb.geography.ua.edu/lizardtech/iserv/calcrgn?cat=North%20America%20and%20United%20States&item=States/California/California1935b.sid&wid=1000&hei=900&props=item(Name,Description),cat(Name,Description)&style=simple/view-dhtml.xsl

[Max Rockatansky]

I had another thought about early CA 17, why stop at Oakland?  The definition of CA 13 announced in 1934 had it ending in San Rafael.  LRN 69 from Point San Quentin to San Rafael existed at the time and it wouldn't have been far fetched to have CA 17 on surface roads through Richmond to the ferry landing at Point Castro.  So why wasn't CA 17 actually signed on local roads before 1940?  There was plenty of State Highways signed on local roadways like CA 33, CA 49, and CA 180 (which can be seen on the map in the previous post) that weren't under state maintenance.

[TheStranger]

I had another thought about early CA 17, why stop at Oakland?  The definition of CA 13 announced in 1934 had it ending in San Rafael.  LRN 69 from Point San Quentin to San Rafael existed at the time and it wouldn't have been far fetched to have CA 17 on surface roads through Richmond to the ferry landing at Point Castro.  So why wasn't CA 17 actually signed on local roads before 1940?  There was plenty of State Highways signed on local roadways like CA 33, CA 49, and CA 180 (which can be seen on the map in the previous post) that weren't under state maintenance.

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the Richmond-San Rafael ferry under private ownership too back then?

But then I recall that was true of the Martinez-Benicia ferry and that was still part of Route 21 before the bridge across the Carquinez Strait was constructed.

[sparker]

I had another thought about early CA 17, why stop at Oakland?  The definition of CA 13 announced in 1934 had it ending in San Rafael.  LRN 69 from Point San Quentin to San Rafael existed at the time and it wouldn't have been far fetched to have CA 17 on surface roads through Richmond to the ferry landing at Point Castro.  So why wasn't CA 17 actually signed on local roads before 1940?  There was plenty of State Highways signed on local roadways like CA 33, CA 49, and CA 180 (which can be seen on the map in the previous post) that weren't under state maintenance.

Any decision to sign non-state-maintained facilities would have originated at the district level; there's no indication that the relevant district for Richmond-area signage, D4, actually did this prior to WWII; the sole instance where this was done, but during and after WWII, was SSR 21 between LRN 75 (later SSR 24 and current CA 242) in Concord and the ferry terminal in Martinez, likely to provide navigational assistance for employees and military personnel stationed at the Port Chicago ammo depot straddling SSR 4.  That section of signed SSR 21 wasn't brought into the state system until later as a "spur" of LRN 75.  But since the Richmond-San Rafael ferry wasn't operated by the state, there was likely no local pressure to sign its access routes, so it simply wasn't of concern to D4 until planning for the actual bridge commenced -- and, during the war, likely considered less vital to the war effort.   This is in direct contrast to D6, which elected to respond to local requests to provide signage for those connecting routes -- likely from the counties, themselves responding to local agricultural interests; that resulted in the signate of ersatz SSR 33, 49, and 180, as well as the central section of SSR 45 further north, over county roads in order to provide navigational continuity for commercial transport.   And into the '50's other districts, famously D7 with SSR 39's "missing link", did likewise for the sake of local navigation.