Highway 85 express lanes face steep opposition

A major project that would add toll lanes to all 24 miles of Highway 85 has cleared environmental review and is headed into early design phases. But city officials across Santa Clara County are offering weak support and outright opposition to the plan, citing a need for more public transit options.

The Valley Transportation Authority has put together an advisory board made up of elected city officials in the county in an attempt to reach consensus on Highway 85 transportation projects. At the center of the discussion is a $176 million proposal by VTA to convert the existing carpool lanes to express lanes, allowing solo drivers to pay a toll to use the lane during peak commute hours.

Express lanes are becoming increasingly popular among transit agencies in the Bay Area as a short-term solution to growing traffic woes. Huge increases in job growth and new housing are predicted in the region between 2010 and 2035, but options are few for increasing roadway capacity. One of the tried-and-true strategies for reducing congestion, according to VTA studies, is to convert existing carpool lanes to express lanes.

VTA announced last month that the creation of express lanes on 4 miles of Highway 237 has been successful in reducing traffic and raising a tidy sum from tolls. Last year, the agency’s board agreed to move forward on designing the start- and end-points of the Highway 85 express lane project. But support outside of the transit agency has been tepid at best.

VTA is also pursuing an express lane project for Highway 101, but despite the long stretches of both highways being considered for the toll lanes, the agency said that neither project warrants a full environmental impact report. That decision ruffled some feathers among several West Valley cities, including Saratoga, Cupertino and Los Gatos; last year, the three cities joined a lawsuit against VTA demanding a full environmental study be done.

Perhaps the biggest point of contention is what to do with the 46-foot-wide median along a long portion of Highway 85. The express lane project calls for converting the median into an additional express lane in each direction, which some West Valley city officials argue would cannibalize what was supposed to be reserved space for some kind of public transit system.

In a 1989 agreement between the Santa Clara County Traffic Authority (the agency preceding VTA) and Saratoga, for example, the authority states that the median would be reserved for mass transportation. The 1990 agreement with Los Gatos calls for preservation of the median for future mass transportation development.

To deal with the massive influx of commuters along the busy corridor, VTA needs to focus on transit options that get solo drivers out of their cars, according to Rod Sinks, a Cupertino City Council member who chairs the SR 85 Corridor Policy Advisory Board. He said a huge number of employees commute out of San Jose and into West Valley and North County cities like Cupertino and Mountain View, but VTA and San Jose have failed to build a complete transit system that can effectively get people to and from work.

Turning the median on Highway 85 into additional express lanes could support roughly 6,000 additional cars in each direction during a three-hour commute period, Sinks said, which could easily be wiped out by a single major expansion of a tech company along the corridor.

“Just effectively widening the roadway is not going to get us where we need to be,” Sinks said. “We live in a transit desert.”

The advisory board, which includes elected officials from 10 cities in the county, agreed at its Feb. 22 meeting to consider several options to improve traffic on Highway 85. Along with converting the carpool lanes and the median to express lanes, the board will consider options including one express lane and an extra “transit” lane — which could be a bus lane, an express bus lane or a corporate bus lane — or a fixed-rail system along the Highway 85 median.

Mountain View City Council member John McAlister, who serves on the advisory board, said his long-term goal is to expand public transit options and get people out of their cars, and that express lanes would be a move in the wrong direction. He said adding an extra lane would increase roadway capacity, but the solution needs to include some form of alternate transportation in order to keep up with traffic needs.

“We’re going to continue to grow, and unfortunately Santa Clara County is not really moving forward in a progressive way to try to resolve (traffic congestion) as quickly and efficiently as I would like to see,” McAlister said.

To solve traffic gridlock, Sinks said, the emphasis should be on reducing transit travel times, which are currently sluggish compared with driving directly to and from work. Traveling from Almaden Valley in South San Jose to Mountain View, he said, will on average take 90 minutes using transit.

Sinks noted many local companies have come to rely on corporate-owned buses to get employees to and from work during the heavy commute hours, which he said has been fairly successful so far. Many companies have been able to meet trip caps and reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles on the road, he said, but it doesn’t really address the needs of everyone else in the community.

“What about the rest of us? What about students, seniors and people not working for the 50 biggest companies?” Sinks said. “We need to actually dig in and figure out how to make the transit system effective.”

When asked whether the lawsuit against VTA might force a wedge between West Valley cities and VTA amid the Highway 85 discussions, Sinks said he believes the lawsuit actually broadens the conversation.

“We’re not doing this lawsuit just to block it, but to entertain a different conversation,” he said. “I don’t think express lanes are inherently bad, but only if people are given another transit option otherwise.”

Last August, VTA board member Johnny Khamis said he was uneasy voting to create a policy advisory board for Highway 85 if it was going to center entirely on whether to approve express lanes on Highway 85. He said he was concerned that the advisory board would serve as a delay tactic that would lead to “paralysis by analysis” from cities that oppose the project.

Unlike many advisory board members, Khamis said he agrees with the VTA analysis that shows the express lane project, including the use of the median for an additional lane, represents an affordable and achievable short-term solution that provides congestion relief in Santa Clara County.

“We know that it costs billions of dollars to build rail. This project is going to cost $170 million, paid for by the tolls that people will pay to use them,” Khamis said. “It costs taxpayers nothing, and to me it’s a no-brainer — we alleviate congestion as soon as possible.”

Express lanes continue to expand

Last month, Bay Area transit agencies met two major milestones in creating a larger express lane network in the region. The Alameda County Transportation Commission opened a 14-mile stretch of the new toll lanes along Highway 580 through Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton, and VTA wrapped up its pilot program on a the first 4 miles of express lanes on Highway 237.

VTA officials are already hailing the 237 express lane project as a success. The first phase of the project, which spans from the Highway 880 to North First Street in San Jose, has improved traffic flow through the highly congested area, according to Brandi Childress, a spokeswoman for VTA.

“Just in that segment, the (travel-time) savings is up to 14 minutes (in the toll lanes) in the area,” Childress said. “We’re looking at over 200,000 hours of travel time savings, both in express lanes and in general use lanes.”

VTA estimates show that about 10,000 solo drivers use the express lane during commute hours, totaling about 2 million vehicles since 2012 and making up about 20 percent of all drivers in the express lane. The agency collects roughly $1 million in revenue from tolls each year, totaling $3.7 million at the end of fiscal year 2015.

The next phase of the Highway 237 project is to extend the express lanes all the way to Highway 101; project construction is expected to begin next year and be completed by the end of 2018.

Despite touting the benefits of express lanes, many remain convinced that express lanes promote social inequality and more single-occupancy vehicle use. The environmental review of the Highway 85 and Highway 101 express lane projects prompted an avalanche of public comment questioning the effectiveness of express lanes, and calling out the idea that wealthy people in the Bay Area will be able to circumvent traffic snarls during commute hours.

Cupertino Mayor Barry Chang, a harsh critic of the express lane project, wrote in a comment to Caltrans that the toll lanes use public roadways as a way of creating greater social inequality in the region.

“It is against the fundamental principle of democracy,” Chang said. “Those who can afford to pay will have a special privilege on a publicly funded roadway. Is that equality?”

Caltrans and VTA officials, including John Ristow, VTA’s director of planning and program development, have argued that express lanes do not promote social inequality. The Caltrans environmental study cites data that shows low-income drivers frequently use express lanes, in part because they benefit from a reliable commute to jobs that may have less schedule flexibility than middle- and high-income drivers.

“Although express lane tolls represent a different economic choice to low-income drivers versus middle- and high-income drivers, the choice does not represent a disproportionate burden because express lane use is voluntary,” according to Caltrans documents.