Santa Cruz County residents can be forgiven if they think nothing significant will ever change regarding something seemingly as clear cut as getting from one end of the county to the other.

It’s not difficult to understand why motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists might be discouraged or that voters might wonder, “What’s the use”?

First, there’s the intractable debate over the Great Rail Trail, a concept now heading for its third decade of arguments and counter arguments. The resounding defeat of Measure D, the Yes Greenway initiative on the June primary ballot, pretty much put a kibosh on the trail-only or trail-as-the-highest priority direction for the county’s Regional Transportation Commission.

The vote leaves trail advocates trying to figure out how to coexist with supporters of a future commuter train, whose cost and potential ridership remain in sharp dispute. What seems obvious is that any progress on trail and train will be incremental and take a long time to become truly effective, affordable and popular.

But 2022’s Measure D was not the only D for Dissembling initiative voters have had to decipher in recent years.

In 2016, another Measure D gave seemingly clear direction that voters, many of whom have consistently been stuck in Highway 1 gridlock, wanted local roads fixed and the highway expanded. Our position: Waiting decades for light rail, or believing that tourists, commuters and seniors will all jump on ebikes or that individual vehicles will soon disappear is a fantasy.

The RTC and CalTrans, the state’s transportation agency, following the 2016 vote, began putting together plans for “auxiliary lanes” on sections of Highway 1 such as the project that added a lane between Morrissey Boulevard and Soquel Avenue completed in December 2013. The result was some congestion relief, but also an advancing of the inevitable bottleneck in a section of the highway that sees some 100,000 vehicles a day.

The next phase would involve constructing northbound and southbound auxiliary lanes and bus-on-shoulder improvements between incredibly busy 41st Avenue and the Soquel Avenue/Drive interchanges, along with a new bicycle and pedestrian over crossing at Chanticleer Avenue. Construction, according to the RTC, has been expected to start later this year.

There are two more phases in the planning phase: Bay Avenue/Porter Street to State Park in Aptos, and State Park to Freedom Boulevard. But this is California, where the California Environmental Quality Act law (CEQA) has stopped many a transportation plan and housing development in its tracks.

So, we’ll have to see what the ultimate delay and possible change in priorities might come from the July 13 court ruling involving a CEQA-based lawsuit by the local Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, which has long opposed any widening of Highway 1, and supports bus-only on highway shoulder improvements.

While the ruling did not uphold a challenge to the expansion of auxiliary lanes, it will also require a reconsideration of plans for High Occupancy Vehicle lanes along the highway, as CalTrans was ordered to recirculate a more “focused draft EIR” for public review and comment addressing several specific issues involved with the project.

While opponents are hoping this latest obstacle will cause RTC planners to reconsider the auxiliary lane projects, and instead spend the money on alternative transportation solutions, we urge the commission to ride out the omnipresent CEQA bumps in the road, and recirculate the environmental report. Then get on with the business of dealing with the traffic and congestion nightmares that are hardly sustainable or environmentally sound.

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Correction: A July 12 Editorial on state help for student housing misstated the locations of UC Santa Cruz plans for the 3,073 bed Student Housing West project. The Hagar Drive site is planned for 140 units of family student housing; the rest of the housing, for upper division undergraduates and graduate students, is planned for a developed site along Heller Drive.