🛣 Headlines About California Highways – January 2023

[cahwyguy]

Yes, it's that time of the month again. Time for headlines.

See here for all the good stuff: https://cahighways.org/wordpress/?p=16513

As always: Ready, Set, Discuss

[Occidental Tourist]

Streetsblog
It's disingenuous to keep claiming that the 57/60 widening was primarily being done to allow access to and from an unbuilt football stadium. AADT on Grand Avenue at the 60 even before they started building the Grand Crossing warehouses was around 30,000.  And the primary goal of the project wasn't to divert stadium traffic.  It was to mitigate the existing second layer of weaving for traffic on the 60 trying exit and enter at Grand in a much shorter merge distance than the layer of traffic already weaving to and from the 57/60 merge.  You don't need stadium levels of traffic to make the weaving onto and off of Grand a problem when you already have two freeways with heavy commercial traffic merging, e.g., that northbound section of freeway was LOS D or LOS F 10 years ago with no stadium.

[Max Rockatansky]

If Bighorn Sheep is what ultimately kills CA 39 for good, how does that bode for other highways in the area that might also have significant closures?  I don't think it is far-fetched to think that a major slide similar to what happened on CA 39 someday hits CA 2 somewhere on Angeles Crest?

The Sierra Club (IMO) rides what happened with Mineral King and CA 276 a little too much, or at least takes too much credit.  There was a lot of elements at play aside that also went into moving Mineral King from Sequoia National Forest to Sequoia National Park.  It still is kind of strange that an actual community (albeit a season one) was annexed into a National Park.  At the very least Mineral King Road remains unaltered, that's quite the unique and fun drive (it is basically a stage road).

Steve Riner's US 70 article was excellent, it is good see him become involved with writing.

[pderocco]

Bighorn sheep:

I'm not persuaded that route 39 will be a catastrophe for bighorn sheep, but route 2 isn't. There's no logic to prohibiting 4.4 miles of route 39 from opening up for the first time in 45 years, when there are many more miles of route 2 that have been open and widely used during that same period. The law apparently allows the presence of a protected specifies to veto the reopening of an existing road that has been closed for a long time, but doesn't interfere with an existing road that has been not been closed. That makes no sense. I'm sure the misanthropic environmentalists would like to shut down route 2 as well, but the fact that they can do one but not the other demonstrates how arbitrary the law is in practice.

Widening highways doesn't fix traffic:

Widening may be sold based on the dream of easing traffic, but the fact that the traffic jams eventually return doesn't mean that we derive no benefit from the widening. Six lanes of bumper to bumper traffic still have 50% higher throughput than four lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. So we still get greater total mobility, giving the public a wider range of choices of where to live and work.

Slip sliding away

I get the feeling that the long drought in the Southwest is somehow leading to more and more roads being taken offline. How can a drought be responsible for this, when the proximate cause is usually a flood? Or is it just a choice to abandon roads that once would have been repaired? I'm thinking about National Trails Highway between Amboy and Fenner. And Kelbaker Road between Kelso and Baker. And most of the roads in the north part of Death Valley NP. And CR-S80 between Ocotillo and Plaster City. And Chuckwalla Valley Rd off I-10. None are crucial roads, but the relevant authorities never used to let things go to pot like this.

Keene pavement project

Do the route 58 curves on the west side of the Tehachapi Mountains cause more accidents than the at-grade intersections at route 223 and Bealville Road?

SF's Central Freeway

Nice of them to tell us that Wiener is gay. That's really relevant.

[Alex]

I recently received an email regarding the page for California State Route 17 on cahighways.org and figured I would pass it along:

Hello:  I don't know if this is exactly the place to post this, but researching the freeway conversion of State Route 17 on the CAhighways.org website, it is stated in the Pre-1964 Signage section that there is or was a 1936 HM Gousha map detailing the San Jose area distributed by Chevron Oil.  Chevron Oil didn't issue a map of San Jose streets until 1953; a few other oil companies did issue maps of this area by Gousha, but they only date back to 1950.  I thought that maybe the post could have referred to a Shell Oil map from 1936, as they got Gousha's date code correct ("J"), but this map was a street map of San Francisco and the Oakland area.  It included a general Bay Region map, but it didn't cover San Jose (it only went as far south as the Sunnyvale area on the Peninsula around Moffett Field NAS.

[cahwyguy]

I recently received an email regarding the page for California State Route 17 on cahighways.org and figured I would pass it along:

Hello:  I don't know if this is exactly the place to post this, but researching the freeway conversion of State Route 17 on the CAhighways.org website, it is stated in the Pre-1964 Signage section that there is or was a 1936 HM Gousha map detailing the San Jose area distributed by Chevron Oil.  Chevron Oil didn't issue a map of San Jose streets until 1953; a few other oil companies did issue maps of this area by Gousha, but they only date back to 1950.  I thought that maybe the post could have referred to a Shell Oil map from 1936, as they got Gousha's date code correct ("J"), but this map was a street map of San Francisco and the Oakland area.  It included a general Bay Region map, but it didn't cover San Jose (it only went as far south as the Sunnyvale area on the Peninsula around Moffett Field NAS.

Thanks. I'll look into that during the next round of updates. Not sure whether it was one of my maps or something posted.

[SeriesE]

57/60 widening

One thing I don't get about the 57/60 concurrency now is the terrain argument for when that segment was initially built.

If the terrain was that unsuitable necessitating a concurrency, then why there are so many buildings built on both sides of the freeway now?

[Plutonic Panda]

Widening highways doesn't fix traffic. Give me your definition of "fix"  and start from there. Just another ridiculous article that shouldn't have been posted here.