Tag Archive for: highway widening

Movement Forming Against Highway Widening

On January 21, 2025, Transform was one of 61 nonprofits that joined together to send a message to California agencies in charge of transportation, housing, and air quality: We urgently need to lower our transportation emissions now. Transform was a central member of the group drafting the letter, which outlines concrete steps the agencies must take to ensure California meets its transportation emission targets. 

Transform’s work advocating for transportation and housing policies to avert climate change has never been more crucial. The wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles are just the latest in a string of climate disasters to rock our state, threatening the lives and livelihoods of Californians. Yet our state agencies and elected officials often act as if changing our driving habits and petroleum addiction would be more harmful than fires and floods that wipe out whole towns and communities.  

We can’t afford to push climate action to some fuzzy date in the future. We need concrete, significant action now. The strong and determined coalition united behind this letter is demanding just that.

No help from Washington

One of the biggest sticking points for climate action is money. It costs money to ensure transit systems have robust operating budgets. Building infill housing near transit hubs takes funding. Creating bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly streets requires infrastructure spending that most California communities can’t take on without support.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and other infrastructure legislation passed during the last administration sent a large influx of money to the states to fund climate-resilient infrastructure. Unfortunately, even under a supportive administration, California used the funding on projects that will lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions

But, as the letter notes, we can’t expect support from the federal government under the current administration, which has already signaled its intent to prioritize oil production and strip EV mandates. The good news is that California has the money it needs for transportation transformation.

Stop building highways

Transportation emissions are the largest single source of GHGs in California, and the state has developed excellent policies to reduce tailpipe emissions. However, while our state’s transportation spending includes some funding to support active and public transportation, we’re still spending too much money on highway expansion.

Every mile of state-controlled highway is a debt against the future. Although planners widen highways to reduce congestion, it’s empirically evident that widening roads only eases traffic flow for a few years. In the long term, it leads to more driving, more pollution, more climate-killing emissions, and even worse traffic jams. And, every highway mile California builds is a future maintenance cost. New highways are money pits that drag climate stability down with them.

The coalition letter demands that the agencies controlling California’s transportation budget take steps to ensure we follow established laws and policies for reducing driving. Plus, simply shifting the money allocated for new freeway miles would free up a significant amount of money that could be used to shore up struggling public transit systems and build low-stress bike networks and walkable neighborhoods.

Strength in numbers

ClimatePlan headed the coalition that sent the letter. The group included environmental advocates like NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club. Regional and statewide active transportation groups signed on, including local bicycle coalitions in Santa Monica, San Diego, the East Bay, and Los Angeles, as well as CalBike and California Walks. The Coalition for Clean Air, the American Lung Association, and the Central California Asthma Collective are part of the coalition, as are climate action groups, including Climate Action California, 350 chapters, and Elders Climate Action. Transit, housing, and street safety groups also signed on.

The diversity of the groups coming together to advocate for a shift in California’s transportation spending reflects the seriousness of the issue. Changing the focus of our transportation policies from moving as many cars and trucks as possible as fast as possible to clean, efficient, and safe alternatives affects every facet of our lives. Spending more on bike lanes and sidewalks creates safer streets, reducing traffic fatalities and injuries. Making transit more efficient reduces air pollution that causes a myriad of diseases, from lung cancer to Alzheimer’s.

A coalition with voices from so many diverse interest areas will be heard in Sacramento. Transform is proud to join forces with allies across disciplines to unite around our shared interest in moving California back from the climate abyss. 

The steps we take to wean California from its carbon addiction are crucial to protect our communities from the worst ravages of climate change. But those same actions also improve health and well-being in a variety of ways. Reimagining our transportation systems is an opportunity to create a future that’s human-centered, efficient, cost-effective, and healthy, for the planet and the creatures who depend on it.

Read the letter:

The Illogic Behind the Drive to Widen Highways

If you’ve lived in the East Bay long enough to remember I-80 before Caltrans added lanes, you know that the congestion now is…about the same as it was before the new lanes. Only, now more cars and trucks inch along, producing more greenhouse gas emissions and deepening the climate crisis.

The failure of this particular highway widening to achieve its stated goal of relieving congestion is no surprise. Engineers have known for decades that wider roads lead to more driving — induced demand — that soon erases any gains from the additional capacity. But knowing and acting on that knowledge are two different things. New “congestion relief” projects on I-680 near Walnut Creek, US 101 along the Peninsula and Highway 37 in the North Bay will throw more money and resources into additional lanes, providing temporary congestion relief while worsening climate change and air pollution. So it’s worth taking a deeper dive into highway widening, the science behind induced demand, and effective solutions to traffic congestion.

Why doesn’t widening relieve congestion?

Induced demand is the concept that if you build more road capacity, more people will drive until congestion reaches the same levels as before you widened the roadway. UCLA postdoc Amy Lee, in a recent interview with Yale Climate Connections, said her research shows that what she calls “induced travel” brings congestion back to pre-widening levels in five to 10 years.

Several factors lead to induced demand. With less congestion initially after a highway is widened, existing drivers make more frequent trips and travel at peak hours when congestion is the worst. Additionally, people who would have traveled by other modes, such as walking, biking, or public transit, shift to driving. A wider highway could encourage developers to build more housing or businesses to locate jobs in far-flung suburbs because the commute appears short enough. And studies show that wider highways don’t shift traffic from other roads; they lead to more driving overall.

So induced demand leads to more driving and more vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which slowly ratchets congestion back up, at which point the solution is to…add even more lanes?

Highway widening to reduce congestion seems logical on its face. If 1,000 cars an hour want to move through a section of roadway that can only handle 500 cars per hour, the extra traffic will cause backups that slow everyone down. If you widen the highway so it has a capacity of 1,000 cars an hour, traffic flows freely, and the problem is solved.

Then drivers see traffic flowing freely, and some who previously avoided the congested section decide to drive on it. Before long, the traffic exceeds the capacity of the highway. Versions of this scenario have been repeated multiple times throughout the United States since the advent of driving.

We can push our bloated highways to their maximum width, funneling more people into single-occupant vehicles and worsening the climate catastrophe California has committed to ameliorate. Or we can accept that highway widening isn’t a truly viable solution for traffic congestion. Instead of waiting until we’ve paved every possible square foot of land, we could look in a different direction now.

Solving for climate and congestion

The solution to our congested roadways is twofold: internalize the true cost of driving and provide better alternatives. The all-lane tolling and road user charge options currently being studied by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and piloted at the California Transportation Commission would make driving more expensive in a way that drivers will feel directly, as opposed to the costs of gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking, which people often discount when they’re calculating the economics of their commutes. Any revenue generated from pricing could be reinvested in driving alternatives and discount programs that lessen the burden for lower-income people who still need to drive.

Offering viable alternatives to driving also relieves congestion. Riding a BART train through the tunnel under the bay is faster than driving across the bridge, and passengers don’t have to pay for parking at their destinations. For transit to be an appealing option, however, it needs to be frequent and reliable. When trains or buses come every few minutes, people know they can show up at the station or stop and hop on. If there are long gaps between trips, taking the bus could add significant travel time, making driving more appealing. People — especially vulnerable passengers such as women, people of color, and seniors — also need to feel safe taking transit. Reliable, frequent buses and trains contribute to safety.

Instead of planning for new highway widening projects that take years to design and build, cost millions of dollars, and don’t solve congestion, California should be focusing on providing better transit, walking, and biking options for all.

A longer-term solution that’s equally critical is to reverse the sprawl that highway widening facilitates and build affordable, dense infill housing near transit, jobs, schools, and community amenities. Rather than forcing low-income residents farther and farther to the edges of the Bay Area, infill development reduces commute times and saves money. BART is moving forward with transit-oriented developments on top of several stations in the East Bay. The regional housing bond measure Transform championed in 2024 would allow many shovel-ready affordable housing projects to break ground; it was pulled from the November ballot, but we hope it comes to voters soon. 

Building more compact neighborhoods and cities is a long-term project but a necessary one. Housing policy can have as big an impact on climate as transportation. Combined with fees or tolls to reduce VMT and enhanced public transit, these solutions will create healthier, more appealing neighborhoods instead of inhospitable cement wastelands of ever-widening highways.

MTC Tolling Study an Important Step Forward, But Equity Concerns Remain 

The Bay Area has two problems with the same solution: highway congestion and the climate crisis. Both require us to drive less and use other transportation modes more. However, incentivizing people to choose other modes can be a challenge.

In 2022, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) launched the Next Generation Bay Area Freeways Study with the goals of “analyzing the feasibility, costs, benefits, and public support for tolling certain Bay Area freeways as a strategy for delivering reliably high-speed travel and reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by passenger vehicles.” In September and October 2024, MTC briefed and solicited feedback from Transform staff on the options it’s studying. 

What is tolling?

Toll roads are not a new concept. In other parts of the country, you can find many highways where drivers must pay a fee on entering or exiting. This may be a flat fee or based on the distance traveled. 

Studies have found that introducing tolls can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Tolls on highway travel have the added benefit of reducing congestion, making travel faster for those who still need to drive. In fact, tolling is a better long-term solution for congestion than adding highway lanes. New lanes, even HOV or tolled lanes, lead to more driving, more greenhouse gases, and — within five to 10 years — more congestion.

Getting around in a private vehicle imposes an external cost on everyone, whether they drive or not, by creating pollution and contributing to a warming climate. Tolls place more of the true costs of driving back on the driver. Tolling is an excellent strategy for the Bay Area to explore. However, as the study notes, the MTC doesn’t currently have the authority to impose tolls; it would need state legislation to do that.

Two tolling options

The MTC study includes six pathways that they studied but really focuses on two main pathways. The first is all-lane highway tolling, which means all lanes of all major highways during weekday rush hours from 6-10 a.m. and 3-7 p.m. would be tolled. The second is a mileage-based user fee that would charge drivers on all roads in the Bay Area based on the number of miles they drive during all hours.

When it comes to affordability, reliability, equity, and safety, each option has its pros and cons, according to modeling MTC staff uses to estimate the costs and benefits. For example, all-lane tolling would potentially:

  • Decrease overall vehicle miles traveled by 4%
  • Decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 2% 
  • Decrease highway peak travel times by 14% 
  • Increase transit usage by 0.3%. 

The tolling option would also be more affordable for families as tolls for households below 200% of the federal poverty level would be capped at a maximum of $70 annually. 

A mileage-based user fee would:

  • Decrease overall vehicle miles traveled by 2%
  • Decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 2%
  • Decrease highway peak travel times by 2%  
  • Increase transit usage by 0.7%. 

A mileage-based user fee would be less affordable for families than all-lane tolling, as households below 200% of the federal poverty level would pay as much as $300 annually before they reached the cap. 

The all-lane tolling option could increase local street usage by 11%, according to MTC’s modeling, bringing more smog and pollution to our local roads. It could also cause local roads to need more frequent repairs, which would upset local politicians. However, it is important to note that tolling freeways doesn’t just divert all the traffic to local roads. It’s also more likely to reduce overall demand for driving, so even though MTC’s modeling shows an increase in local road usage, we might not see this big of an increase on local roads when it’s applied in real-world conditions. This option would decrease vehicle miles traveled on highways by much more than a mileage-based user fee, but the user fee does not increase local street usage at all. In fact, it decreases street usage by 2%.

Increasing transit usage is an important cornerstone of Transform’s philosophy, and the mileage-based user fee would increase transit usage more than highway tolling because it would generate more revenues than highway tolling. Therefore, more transit investments could be made by reinvesting revenues from the mileage-based user fee for transit for the same amount of GHG reduction. The user fee has a lower initial financial cost to implement because it comes with zero capital costs and brings in an annual net revenue of $2 billion. All-lane tolling would require $2.3 billion in capital costs to implement and would bring in an annual net revenue of $550 million.

Equitable tolling

For Transform, equity is an essential component in all policy changes. Tolling and increasing transit ridership are imperative in reaching our state climate goals and decreasing climate change globally. If structured equitably, these measures can also redress past transportation harms and avoid burdening already struggling families. 

One of the best ways to mitigate harm to lower-income drivers is by capping the amount of money low-income families will pay in new tolls. MTC has proposed monthly caps on toll expenditures where households earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level — $62,400 for a family of four — only pay a maximum of $30 a month, while households at 200-300% of the federal poverty level would only pay a $60 maximum per month. 

Additionally, highway tolls could result in a large increase in the use of local streets. While this model states that equity priority communities — Census tracts with a significant concentration of underserved populations, including people of color and households with low incomes — would not be disproportionately impacted, we remain cautious that the increase in vehicle miles traveled on local streets doesn’t disproportionately impact communities already burdened by pollution. 

Equity includes ensuring that all regions of the Bay Area benefit from the money raised through tolling. Therefore, it is concerning that, in the highway tolling option being studied by MTC, the North Bay would only get 6% of the revenue from regional tolling for transit, local roads, and reparative infrastructure (investments in highway-adjacent low-income communities, such as urban greening and highway pedestrian crossings). We are all one region, so re-investment should not be exclusively tied to the percentage of county-generated revenue but allocated with the need and the importance of regional connectivity in mind. 

All-lane tolling must also be equitable in how revenues are spent. MTC has proposed that 50% of the revenue from all-lane tolling will go to transit improvements, while 30% will go to roadway improvements and 15% to ‘reparative community investments.’ Since low-income and marginalized communities disproportionately use transit and have been harmed by past transportation decisions, the expenditures from all-lane tolling as proposed are progressive and would be an important step toward a more equitable transportation system.

Next steps for tolling

In a November 2024 policy advisory council meeting, MTC staff stated that while they are not saying one specific policy is better than another, they recommend that for Plan Bay 2050+, MTC should maintain the highway all-lane tolling option as a strategy in the plan and update it with the “latest strategy specifics to better balance tradeoffs between mobility, environmental, and equity outcomes.” In its upcoming implementation plan, MTC will identify actions to address some of the challenges mentioned in this blog.  

While potential implementation of these tolling or user fee options would not start until 2035, MTC will be giving recommendations and an implementation roadmap during the fall and winter of 2024 and 2025, so this is a vital time for Transform to weigh in. We have been selected to be part of a diverse group of stakeholders participating in this process and have consistently reiterated the importance of equity in all tolling policy recommendations. 

It’s critical to move forward on all-lane tolling, but Transform remains committed to ensuring an equitable solution moves forward. 

Transform and Allies Call Out Plan to Streamline Highway 37 Widening

In late August, Transform joined with 24 environmental, transportation, and other advocacy organizations to send a letter to California Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire opposing a plan to amend a 2023 law. The law provided special streamlining privileges under California’s endangered species laws to certain clean energy and water infrastructure projects. This year’s amendment would have extended those special streamlining privileges to a project to widen State Route 37 between Vallejo and State Route 121 in Sonoma County, which will have significant impacts on a sensitive salt marsh habitat. 

SR 37 does often experience traffic congestion, but decades of research and lived experience have proven that adding lanes does not solve congestion. And, at its core, the proposal to widen the highway is the wrong solution to a very complicated but completely different problem.

How to drown $500 million

The project to add lanes to SR 37 is described as “interim.” That’s because the $500 million the state proposes spending to add capacity to this highway segment, which is right at sea level and is regularly inundated during king tides, will likely be underwater due to climate change within 15 years. The long-term proposal is to raise the roadbed to accommodate future sea level rise, a much more expensive and involved undertaking.

The irony of building additional lanes that will increase driving, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions, on a roadway that is likely to be submerged by climate change appears to be lost on planners.

Real problems—real solutions

The reason for the congestion on SR 37 is rooted in economics as much as transportation policy. Sonoma County has a dearth of affordable housing, so many of the people who work in its vineyards and tourist industry live in more affordable communities in Solano County. Those workers must drive to their jobs in Sonoma County towns and cities because of a lack of public transportation options.

Widening the highway is an acceptance of an unacceptable status quo, where working-class people are forced into long, expensive commutes.

The solution is two-fold. Sonoma County must build more housing, particularly more affordable housing, so employees have the opportunity to live closer to their places of work. This is a long-term project that won’t be easy, but it’s essential.

The second solution is to provide more frequent and reliable transit options between Solano and Sonoma cities. This could be accomplished fairly quickly. In our letter, we recommend tolling on the existing lanes of SR 37. The revenue this generates could support expanded public transportation. The tolling scheme could be designed to minimize the cost to low-income households and would cost substantially less than $500 million to implement. 

Over the long term, passenger rail is planned for this corridor to connect to the Capitol Corridor service between Sacramento and the Bay Area, which will provide another alternative to driving in the future.

Facing the realities of climate change

Highway expansion should no longer be a default solution to congestion. In congested corridors like Highway 37, widening will only serve to increase driving and ultimately worsen congestion. Choosing to invest in alternative solutions will not be easy; California has entrenched administrative structures and industries built around expanding highways, so change must include just transitions for workers and businesses. 

But, despite the challenge, we must change the way we think about transportation planning. Our freeway mentality has driven us to the brink of climate catastrophe. A future focused on infill housing development, housing affordability, and a broad array of low- and no-carbon transportation options is the only way to move toward a more stable and liveable planet.

Read the full letter.