Bay Area’s Traffic Woes to Grow Worse Before Any Improvement

A publishing executive who reluctantly fled sunny California for frigid New England three years ago returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for a midwinter business trip and could not wait to get back home to subzero weather.

The reason? Traffic.

“I can’t believe it got this much worse in just a few years,” Roger Strukhoff, 34, said after traveling at a snail’s pace from San Jose through Silicon Valley to Palo Alto.

“I miss a lot of things (about California), but those freeway jam-ups aren’t one of them,” he said. “I’d rather drive through Peterborough (N.H., pop. 2,000) in a blizzard than creep along in this mess.”

That outlook may be a bit extreme, but for 6 million people in the nine-county area that includes Oakland and booming San Jose, congested highways have become a way of life.

Although a teeming business hub, San Francisco sits as a prisoner of its own unrivaled beauty--hemmed in by salt water on three sides and connected to much of the rest of the world by its two famous spans, the Golden Gate and the 7.5-mile parking lot officially known as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Even suburban freeways are straining under the unforeseen burdens of stop-and-go congestion as industries--and jobs--materialize in far-flung regions that were barely populated when the highway system was conceived and built.

The California Department of Transportation said Bay Area motorists lose 163 million hours each year to traffic delays, or roughly 27 hours per person per year wasted fuming behind the wheel.

Statistically, Bay Area drivers run a 1-in-5 chance of getting stuck in a traffic snarl anytime they take a drive.

The seriousness of the crisis became agonizingly evident last Dec. 23, when San Francisco experienced one of the worst traffic jams in recent memory.

The combination of workers getting a head start on the Christmas vacation and thousands of incoming and outgoing last-minute shoppers turned the Bay Bridge and most of its approaches into parking lots.

What’s more, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Most experts agree that although the system is overburdened and obsolete, the geographical and sociological nature of the Bay Area all but rules out many new freeway routes.

“We’re pretty much stuck with improving what we’ve already got,” explained Paul Maxwell, manager of planning for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a regional agency which oversees transportation spending in the Bay Area.

“We’re trying to increase the capacity of existing highways,” added spokesman Gregory M. Bayol of the state Department of Transportation. “There are constraints, of course--money, land-use restrictions and water, which is by far the biggest constraint in the area.”

The unique geography of the San Francisco Peninsula means that traffic congestion is inherent and cannot be completely wiped out, unless people just stop driving.

“It’s a huge urban area with a big body of water in the middle,” Bayol said, throwing up his arms to dramatize the frustration of traffic engineers past and present.

“Bridges are just too expensive.”

There currently is one new freeway on the drawing boards, California 85, which would run in a gentle arc through the newly urbanized expanses of south San Jose.

Several other projects are in the planning stages, but most appear doomed by what political analysts like to call the “not-in- my -back-yard-you-don’t” attitude among voters.

That attitude, combined with environmental and aesthetic concerns, prompted San Francisco residents of the 1950s and 1960s to thwart projects that could have helped increase traffic flow, most notably a second Bay Bridge, connecting Alameda with the San Francisco waterfront.

Encased by Concrete

When tourists ask why the mile-long Embarcadero Freeway features cement blocks at both ends, San Franciscans are proud to point out how, for the sake of the urban landscape, they shot down state plans for a solid freeway link between the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.

The people of the traffic-choked Santa Clara Valley, however, have little to lose in the way of urban vistas. Two years ago, voters considered proposed California 85 important enough for them to dip into their pockets to help pay some of the estimated $1.2-billion bill.

“It (85) could be the last example of new freeways in the Bay Area,” Maxwell said. “We’re a mature urban area. When you run out of space. . . . “

A parade of witnesses at a hearing in Oakland last fall lambasted the state Transportation Department, commonly known as Caltrans, for not acting faster, accusing it of construction delays that have spawned huge increases in the costs of highway projects.

The sharpest critics were from Alameda and Santa Clara counties, where voters raised their sales taxes by half a cent per dollar to pay for a combined $2 billion in roadway improvements.

‘Voluntarily Taxed Selves’

“Voters have voluntarily taxed themselves to fix the problems. We’re going to be mad if Caltrans or Sacramento or anyone else delays us in these projects,” declared Alameda County Supervisor Robert G. Knox.

Then-Director Leo J. Trombatore of Caltrans acknowledged that his agency was hampered by under-funding and by strict federal and state laws governing highway spending and environmental requirements. He said cost estimates have soared because projects had to be expanded to cope with suburban growth and increased commuter traffic.

“It’s a new world,” said Bayol. “Money, or lack of it, has kept us from doing a lot of work we wanted to do.”

But he insisted that counties willing to raise a sizable chunk of their own financing are more likely to win the competition for new highway projects.

“This is a major departure--it was unthought-of before,” Maxwell said of the county taxes. “The current climate is moving in that direction. People will realize they’ve got to shoulder some of the burden themselves.”

Trying to adapt a 1960s freeway system to the needs of the Bay Area’s commuters of the 1980s is a difficult, if not futile, task that is creating headaches for state engineers.

A prime example is the interchange of Interstate 680 and California 24 in Walnut Creek, which handles traffic heading to or from San Francisco on the west, bustling suburbs on north and east and San Jose traffic to the south.

It’s a chronic trouble spot, a permanent glitch on the screens of traffic engineers.

As recently as 10 years ago, the adjoining stretch of Interstate 680 was little more than a four-lane rural connector. Now the state plans to expand that choked 15-mile highway to the maximum 10 lanes.

Where virtually no urban jobs existed in the early 1970s, office complexes and industrial parks now employ an estimated 50,000 people along the freeway corridor in the rolling foothills east of the bay. Workers commute from all directions.

“It’s a suburban growth phenomenon,” Maxwell said. “We’re seeing it everywhere. It’s several factors coming together. People want to live and work in the same city, in the same area. Employment is moving out of the central city, gas prices are down, there are more two-worker households.

“All of that puts a lot more cars on the road.”

Jim Bourgart, vice president for transportation for the Bay Area Council, said a similar phenomenon is surfacing along U.S. 101 just south of San Francisco.

“There’s a lot of new business parks and office buildings,” Bourgart said. “A lot of the people taking those jobs can’t afford to live there. That’s one of the forces behind the problem.”

Long-Distance Commutes

Workers are making daily round trips of 100 miles or more, he said. “That’s causing problems, and public transit doesn’t work with that kind of a commute.”

The three worst suburban commute areas all experienced rapid employment growth during the first half of the decade, but housing increased at only half the job rate.

Employment in southern Alameda County on the east side of the bay skyrocketed 30% as 15,200 new jobs were created between 1980 and 1985. The number of households rose just 16% during that time, Bourgart said.

Similar jumps in jobs matched with weak gains in housing were reported in San Jose to the south and in the Concord-Walnut Creek area in Contra Costa County, northeast of the bay. In contrast, San Francisco jobs increased 2.1% and the number of households inched up 3%.

“It’s obvious where the growth is,” Bourgart said.

Car-pooling and ride-sharing would help alleviate some of the stress, he said.