As he drives along the busy Highway 50 corridor, Sergio Ochoa
Sánchez feels more than a touch of pride in what Caltrans and its
contractors have achieved. As we travel its length in his
Caltrans truck, from downtown east to Watt Avenue, the public
information officer — wearing an orange reflector vest, his thick
gray hair carefully brushed — points out new 10-feet-high
cinderblock sound walls, in-progress HOV lanes that will be
drivable within a couple months, new highway signs and verges
covered in scrubby bushes that will soon have verdant plants
beautifying them.

Underneath us, sensors are embedded in the asphalt every few feet
on every lane, feeding real time traffic flow information into
the Caltrans system.

It is an unseasonably cold, rainy day for May, and because of the
weather, no construction work is taking place. But when Ochoa
Sánchez parks on the Alhambra Boulevard overpass and stands by
the high chain-link fencing looking down at the speeding cars, he
almost becomes an over-protective father.

He “tsks” at the vehicles, many going far beyond the speed limit,
their headlights off despite the dark storm clouds, and he points
out the newly tarmacked HOV lanes, running in both directions,
that will soon make the local commute easier. He talks fondly of
the beautiful plants that will soon replace the scrubby, browned
borders.

If you live and drive in the Capital Region, you can’t help but
be aware of the huge road construction projects on the major
highways. These projects are designed ultimately to improve
traffic flow and safety on I-50, I-80 and I-5, as well as to make
journeys more manageable for cyclists.

But commuters have seen on-again, off-again lane and ramp
closures for the past several years, since the Fix50 project,
running from Watt Avenue west to the I-5 connector, got underway
in 2021 at the height of the pandemic. Some nights, so many lanes
and off-ramps were closed for construction that unfortunate
drivers had to crawl in traffic for additional miles until they
found an open off-ramp and then made a circuitous way back home
from there.

Caltrans Public Information Officer Sergio Ochoa Sánchez says the
5-year, Fix50 project on Highway 50 was one of the most complex
construction projects Caltrans has done in 50 years. (Photo by
Fred Greaves)

“Fix50 is one of the most complex
construction projects Caltrans has endeavored in the last 50
years,” says Ochoa Sánchez. “The project is to repair and rehab
the whole area and add traffic intelligence systems, an HOV (high
occupancy vehicle) lane, do work on drainage. Also, there are
some areas of the highway where the highway went down a little
bit to have more space for bigger trucks.”

Along parts of the downtown highway maze, protected bicycle lanes
are also being added.

Over the coming months, with a bit of luck, according to
Caltrans, the traffic snarls should be easing as the rehabbed
routes will become fully functional. The large construction sites
under the downtown overpasses should be cleaned up and the
heavy-duty work vehicles withdrawn. In time, the dust, grit and
the grime of these hard-hat construction areas will dissipate;
left in their wake, officials hope, will be a state-of-the-art
highway system.

For years now, the Fix50 project has been scorned by the media
and has served as a target for angry drivers caught up in its
traffic snarls. Ochoa Sánchez says that he has fielded more than
his fair share of unhappy callers. “Everyone’s an engineering and
construction expert when it comes to closures,” he says,
laughing. Now, though, he can see the metaphorical light at the
end of the tunnel, and to his eyes even in the rain, it is a
pleasing sight.

Projects around the region

The nearly complete Fix50 project is only one of several large
highway investments in the Capital Region that have been worked
on in the years since the pandemic.

First, there was the I-5 project, opening up additional lanes on
the freeway from Elk Grove northward into Sacramento, and shaving
up to ten minutes off an average commute. This one was completed
some months back, although work on expanding the freeway on the
stretch north to Natomas and the airport is ongoing.

Meanwhile, lane expansions on I-80 began last summer in the area
from Davis to downtown Sacramento — squeezing in additional toll
lanes on the causeway, eating into hard shoulder real estate,
without physically expanding the size of the road itself. There’s
also a long-overdue $269 million rehabilitation of the American
River Bridge from Exposition Boulevard east across the river to
5th Street. Both are slated to be wrapped up by mid-autumn.
Caltrans spokespeople hope that if the weather cooperates, most
of the project will actually be finished before the end of the
summer, leaving only some drainage and electrical work to be
completed over the following months.

Smart traffic control

Adding smart sensors under the surface of the expanding freeways
allows Caltrans to monitor traffic flow in real time and tweak
the on-ramp metering systems to optimize the speed of traffic.
The agency feeds that information to drivers through Caltrans’
Quick Map app to significantly reduce commute times. By
extension, if cars aren’t sitting in traffic for as long, that
ought to lower the amount of gas expended by each driver and thus
the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the region.

“When you’re talking about the downtown corridor, it’s
notorious for delays; it’s always been like that.”

— Dennis Keaton, Caltrans PUBLIC INFORMATION
OFFICER

Yet none of this comes cheap. Each of the big projects in the
Capital Region, chosen because of the high use of those stretches
of highway and the frequency of long traffic delays along their
routes, costs  hundreds of millions of dollars. That is
money which has been made available by a combination of
use-it-or-lose-it federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars, as
well as state and local funding streams.

Caltrans argues that it is money well spent, and once the
construction is over — along with the commuters’ pain that goes
with lane closures — it will ultimately improve the lives of
drivers and make the region’s highway infrastructure both safer
and greener over the coming decades. Regarding the stretch of
I-80 under construction, Public Information Officer Dennis Keaton
explains that “It’s one of the busiest stretches of highway. When
you’re talking about the downtown corridor, it’s notorious for
delays; it’s always been like that.”

Why aren’t we funding alternate modes of transportation?

Not everyone is convinced, however, of the wisdom of these
projects. Yes, in the short term it might reduce commute times.
But ultimately, as those commute times are reduced, the goal is
to allow more vehicles to use the roads without clogging them up.
And that, says post-doctoral scholar Amy Lee at UC Davis’
Institute for Transportation Studies, is self-defeating. In the
long run, it is going to be bad for the state’s goals for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as for air quality
mandates codified by the Clean Air Act.

Moreover, she argues, once all the additional drivers are drawn
into commutes on the newly expanded highways, over the coming
years the traffic snarl conditions will once again return — with
the additional lanes simply being taken up by additional
vehicles. “If you’re trying to minimize those things, widening
highways is not the route I’d be taking,” Lee says.

Cones mark an area of road work near the Stockton Boulevard exit.
(Photo by Fred Greaves)

The UC Davis scholar would prefer that
these huge sums of money were instead spent on beefing up the
Capital Region’s inadequate public transport system. She would
like the light rail system to have more cars and drivers and thus
be able to run trains more frequently. She would like improved
Amtrak service from the San Joaquin area north to Livermore. She
would like Sacramento’s train station to be expanded to
accommodate high speed rail trains that, she hopes, will one day
grace the region. And she would like to see a rail connection
north to the airport.

All of these projects have been discussed in planning meetings in
the Capitol Region; yet none of them, as yet, has been funded. As
a result, they remain aspirational goals for if and when
significantly more dollars one day start flowing to public
transit in the Sacramento area.

Meanwhile, funds for large highway projects keep rolling in. When
this round of highway improvements comes to a close, commuters
may get to take a breather, and may have months — or even years —
without major improvement-related traffic problems. But that
respite is likely to only be temporary.

Already, there are proposals in Sacramento for a beltway, known
as the Capital SouthEast Connector Expressway, that would convert
small farm roads south and east of the city into a big highway
connecting Elk Grove to El Dorado Hills or Folsom. (With this
project under discussion, real estate developers have already
started planning new housing hubs along the route.) There are
ongoing discussions around a $250 million project to extend
Broadway with a bridge going over the Sacramento River to West
Sacramento.

In addition to these large-scale construction works, there are
smaller fixes slated for I-5 in the Woodland area; several
bridges in the Delta are due for retrofits; and some work is
being done along State Route 12. In neighboring Yolo County,
parts of State Route 16 are being spruced up. And in the Bay Area
to the west, Gov. Gavin Newsom has fast-tracked a $500 million
project to widen Highway 37, which funnels commuters from
relatively affordable cities such as Vacaville and Fairfield
north to Marin County and the wine country region.

It seems a truism in the politics of big road building projects:
If use-it-or-lose-it money is made available, big projects that
have languished for decades will suddenly become necessities.
There is, says Lee, hay to be made from politicians rolling up
their sleeves and showing how serious they are about short-term
reductions in traffic congestion. “It’s your tax dollars at
work,” she says, that politicians can claim of the region’s
massive, traffic-snarling, road-improvement projects. “It (the
I-80 project) got legs when it won a federal grant.”

Despite all of the commuter road rage about the time these
projects have taken and the commuter headaches they have caused,
and despite the questions Lee raises about the funding
priorities, now that the highway fixes are wrapping up, Ochoa
Sánchez is confident they will come to be seen as a plus for the
region.

“I do believe it’s going to be worth it, yes,” he says. “And with
the I-80 rehabilitation project also slated to be completed by
summer, it’s going to be a smooth commute.” Drive times to and
from the Bay Area and to and from Lake Tahoe will, he argues,
fall, and the route itself will become more pleasant. “It’s going
to be very nice when it’s complete,” he says. I feel a sense of
pride and ownership. It’s going to be very good for the area.”

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