Who are all these people and where are they going?

It’s a question the untold thousands of people attempting to get across the county or just to run simple errands are asking.

Traffic gridlock has been a nightmare for many years locally, of course. It lessened, somewhat, during the pandemic as commuters to Silicon Valley worked from home and tourist destinations shut down and schools were closed.

But once the guardrails came off on travel, and once workers once again headed to and from Highway 17, pity the poor driver who simply wanted to “hop on” Highway 1, or use surface streets to get from here to there.

This past Wednesday, for instance, would have, in miniature, put Los Angles to shame in terms of traffic congestion. Not only were tourists coming from the south to destinations unknown resulting in a clogged Highway 1 daily, starting around 8 a.m., but work is underway on the widening of our only north-south highway, from Capitola to the Morrissey off-ramp. While this work does not close down lanes during commute hours, drivers inevitably slow down to see what’s going on, and as traffic engineers can testify, the delay just moves down the line. Just like the afternoon bottleneck going south.

To add to that, work on improving highway on and off-ramps is underway. On Wednesday, for instance, the Bay/Porter ramps into Capitola were closed. This work sent thousands more vehicles onto surface streets – mainly Soquel Drive in Mid-County (AKA “Highway 2”), which was impossibly snarled. Frustrated motorists were pulling out of long lines of somnolent vehicles to try, fruitlessly, to find other avenues to get to their destinations. The backups were everywhere.

And all this is happening with schools out of session for the summer.

No doubt, tourism has been on an upswing and during the inland heat wave of the past few weeks, people from as far away as the Central Valley have flocked to local beaches for relief. Sitting in traffic to get here seems worth it rather than suffocating in unrelenting 100-degree heat. Ours is a beautiful county, traffic jams notwithstanding. More people want to come here, and will come here.

Are there answers?

It takes some faith, but there are three projects, concepts, that eventually may bring some relief.

The county Regional Transportation Agency, in partnership with the state and local jurisdictions, is overseeing a massive construction project that will, in time, widen Highway 1, improve Soquel Avenue and Drive, and give busses dedicated space to travel.

But as critics of these projects have pointed out, build it and they will come. In other words adding an additional lane on Highway 1 won’t solve everything, because it too will soon fill up.

For those concerned about climate change, and we should be, one answer might be electric vehicles, and indeed there seem to be many more e-cars on the road (mostly Teslas, no matter Elon Musk’s erratic pronouncements and stewardship of Twitter).

But e-vehicles are just more cars – and soon, trucks – on local roads, even if they are not spewing more carbon into the atmosphere. And they don’t change the reality that Californians are deeply enmeshed in our car culture and it will be a huge societal culture shift to change this. In other words, we’re not Europe, not yet.

Still, the highway projects, which will eventually stretch to Freedom Boulevard, will overall be a major improvement for beleaguered motorists. The auxiliary lanes will be constructed over the next three or four years, while adding to the traffic slowdown,

Building seven miles of the coastal recreational trail, from Santa Cruz to Seacliff, also is funded and scheduled over the next four years.

A commuter train, if it gets fully funded, could become a viable option. But such a train, favored by many county residents, is at least a decade away, funding notwithstanding.

Three answers, but none short term. We’ll choose to believe, however, that these eventually will make a difference and someday, someday, we’ll be able to travel short distances in the county without descending into traffic hell.