Down the Road, a New Name Perhaps

The highway that cleaves this valley will never make the list of most scenic, though the pink and white flowers planted along its spine just might be the biggest collection of oleanders in the world.

Highway 99 runs straight up the gut of California, from Weedpatch to Red Bluff, through 450 miles of industrial farms and beaten-up towns and wannabe big cities. With the rivers dammed and lakes drained dry, no feature on the Central Valley map quite throbs with life as 99 does.

It moves the way the Sierra snowmelt used to move through the flatlands, day and night, carrying migrants to fields, tourists to the Sierra Nevada and crops to market.

But, like the 20,000 acres of farms that give way each year to the developer’s plow, the old highway is now seen as an obstacle to progress. A group of valley politicians and businessmen, trying to put a dent in the region’s 15% to 17% jobless rates, wants to turn California Highway 99 into an interstate.

They say Fresno is the largest U.S. city (440,000 residents) not tied to the interstate system. The absence of a federal highway is one reason national and international firms refuse to locate here, they believe.

Call the roadway I-9 or I-999 (I-99 already exists in central Pennsylvania); it doesn’t matter. Once Washington underwrites billions of dollars in road and bridge improvements, the main artery of this heartland will finally show up fat and blue on company maps.

“One of the very first questions companies ask before they locate somewhere is ‘How close by is the nearest interstate?’ ” said Tim Lynch, a finance manager for the city of Fresno, which is pushing for the change. “We have plenty of cheap land and a central location but no interstate. Highway 99 literally isn’t on the maps that these companies pull up. So we don’t even make the first cut.”

Preservationists -- if supporters of a four-lane highway can be called such a thing -- oppose the change on historical grounds. Highway 99 may not be the El Camino Real, the King’s Road that links the Spanish missions, but it boasts a rich lore. What began as an old stagecoach trail that extended from Mexico to Canada became the longest toll-free road in the world, they say -- the so-called Highway of Three Nations.

For 70 years, perhaps no route has belonged more to the working man. It’s the road traveled by the Okies and the road that slices through the narratives of Steinbeck and Saroyan, Carey McWilliams and Cesar Chavez.

A few years back, when a Berkeley publisher needed a title for a collection of stories and poems about the valley, he found the one thread that connected the disparate voices: Highway 99.

“There’s history in a name, significant history, and if you change the name, you lose the history,” said Chris Brewer, a San Joaquin Valley publisher and historian. “If we’re trying to tell everyone that we’re the food basket of the world and come here and get a glimpse of authentic California, then why pave over our artery, our lifeblood?”

Remaking Highway 99 is nothing new. From the 1920s to the ‘60s, it was actually a U.S. route that linked Southern California to the rest of the state. U.S. 99 ran through Indio, San Bernardino, Pomona, Rosemead, Pasadena and Burbank before shooting north up the Grapevine. Eventually, the Southern California leg was replaced by I-5 and I-10. By the mid 1960s, a new California 99, which took in parts of the old route, had risen in the Central Valley.

Preservationists agree that this latter-day Highway 99 could use a serious face-lift. Caltrans is spending more than $2 billion to improve the highway over the next several decades, adding one or two new lanes and erecting metal barriers on both sides of the oleander median to stop sleepy truck drivers from crossing into oncoming traffic.

But the supporters of an interstate say the improvements will be nowhere near enough to make up for decades of neglect and growth.

They point out that the federal government is working to identify federal highway projects for the next 20 years, and say the valley needs to move quickly to grab a piece of the pie.

“With the federal transportation act now being reauthorized, we’ve got a window of opportunity,” said Fresno County Supervisor Juan Arambula. “No one’s saying that turning Highway 99 into an interstate is a magic bullet. But put it together with some other things we’re doing, and it holds the promise for improving our economy.”

The Great Valley Center, a Modesto-based think tank, has grappled for years with ways to diversify the economy. In the late 1990s, during the height of the dot-com surge, it was argued that the valley needed to lure assembly-line jobs away from Silicon Valley. Lately, some future-thinkers have even dared to embrace the local mainstay, agriculture -- with ideas about piggybacking food processing and even tourism onto farms.

The fate of Highway 99 has remained central to those discussions. Searching for an issue that leaders could rally around, the Great Valley Center began focusing on what is euphemistically called the highway’s “aesthetic challenges.”

Although there may be a certain beauty in the geometry of vineyards and orchards, the same cannot be said for cities along the route. The section of Fresno that abuts the highway, for instance, is arguably the city’s ugliest -- a knot of fast-food restaurants, wrecking yards and recycling centers.

“We tend to think of Highway 99 as our service road, our back alley,” said Dan Whitehurst, former mayor of Fresno who heads the center’s task force on improving the Highway 99 corridor.

“For most people coming through our region, that is their view of our place. We need to make it a Main Street, with signs telling them what crops are being grown and places to buy our fruits and vegetables,” he said. “People are looking for real places, and we need to do a better job of showing our quaintness and rural side.”

It was Whitehurst who came up with the idea of using federal transportation dollars, and an interstate designation, to remake the route. He sees no contradiction in preserving what is rural about the valley while turning its main road into a superhighway.

But critics of the change say it is based on a false premise. On most U.S. maps, Highway 99 already shows up big and blue.

It’s not the lack of an interstate, they say, but other factors, such as a poorly educated work force, that discourage national and international companies from locating here.

“Changing the name of Highway 99 to lure new business is one of the sillier notions I’ve heard,” said Gerald Haslam, the longtime writer of middle California who grew up on the outskirts of Bakersfield. “On the road to turning itself into another yuppie-ville, the valley just keeps forgetting its history.”

The cost of the job may make the whole debate moot. More than 100 overpasses simply aren’t high enough to satisfy federal interstate standards and would have to be replaced, each one costing $10 million to $30 million, say California Department of Transportation officials.

“Between the bridges and the road-widening, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Alan McCuen, Caltrans’ deputy director for planning for the San Joaquin Valley, which stretches from the Tehachapi Mountains to the Sacramento River.

Supervisor Arambula and other supporters have spread the idea from Fresno to Kern to Merced counties, enlisting the support of city council members and boards of supervisors.

But before the idea could be considered at the federal level, state transportation officials would have to make a formal request, and that has yet to occur.

“I’m not going to say that there won’t be a loss of history and lore,” Arambula said. “But those big orange hamburger stands along the road have all but disappeared. It’s not the same Highway 99 I knew growing up in Pixley.”