For more than 30 hours beginning last Thursday, one of the major
arterial roadways linking Silicon Valley and the great Central
Valley in California shut down.
For more than 30 hours beginning last Thursday, one of the major arterial roadways linking Silicon Valley and the great Central Valley in California shut down.
Two trucks collided and one spewed potassium nitrate onto the highway.
For a few nearby residents it prompted a day of quiet bliss; for everyone else, a nightmare.
It’s unfathomable that for 20-plus years our state legislature has simply patched Band-aid after Band-aid on the serious Highway 152/Pacheco Pass safety and commerce problem. Meanwhile, the most dangerous game is played out daily on a 13-mile, two-lane stretch of highway that slows to a crawl on weekends and morphs into a parking lot on holidays, choking the air with fumes and strains motorists’ holiday spirits.
Backups, delays and traffic jams mean pollution, lost productivity and wasted fuel. All that is frustrating, but it’s the accidents that needlessly cost lives that must stop.
In December, four people died in a fiery crash just west of the Don Pacheco Y, after a head-on collision between a delivery truck and a sport utility vehicle. The smaller car careened down a hill and burst into flames, with the occupants still trapped inside.
Afterward, the San Benito County Council of Governments formed a subcommittee that is charged with gauging public opinion about the controversial plan to widen Highway 156 between Hollister and San Juan Bautista.
The most popular alternative seems to be the “3-in-1” proposal, a new four- or six-lane highway that would connect the Don Pacheco Y intersection to U.S. 101 near the San Benito/Santa Clara county line. The project isn’t cheap – it could potentially cost more than $1 billion – but many residents consider it a permanent solution to the region’s traffic congestion.
It’s time for all local politicians to step up and get something done; it happened in the late ’90s when County Supervisor Don Gage and Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy pushed to move up the U.S. 101 median project after several fatal accidents.
The Valley Transportation Authority and the politicians have ignored the infamous traffic jams and the death and destruction on Highway 152 for too long. It’s time to find a solution.
