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And you thought the movie “Cats” got bad reviews.
Check out this feedback on the recent decision by Caltrans to nearly double carpool lane hours on Highway 101 in Marin and Sonoma counties:
“Hate it. Has doubled my commute time.”
“My commute from Santa Rosa to San Rafael has increased by 30 minutes.”
“20-minute commute is now an hour.”
“Made my commute noticeably worse. There is congestion where there didn’t used to be.”
“I wake up an hour earlier and get home an hour to an hour-and-a-half later.”
“Terrible decision, poorly thought out, illogical, a disaster all around.”
“Caltrans made a horrible mistake.”
“SUCKS!”
Those are excerpts from the 150-plus Press Democrat readers who replied to a prompt to share their thoughts on the new carpool lane hours.
The responses were remarkable for their negativity and near-unanimity. People really don’t like Caltrans’ new high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane hours, which on Sept. 8 were extended in the morning from 5 to 10 a.m., and in the evening from 3 to 7 p.m., in both directions, in both counties.
Before that, hours had been less restrictive: 7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. in both directions in Sonoma County.
HOV lane hours in Marin had been 6:30 to 8:30 a.m. southbound, and 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. going north.
Adding insult to injury, said Santa Rosa City Council Member Jeff Okrepkie, is the timing of Caltrans’ move. It changed the hours just a few weeks before drivers of electric vehicles are scheduled to lose their carpool lane privileges, forcing many of those EVs into the regular lanes, which will add to the congestion.
With the Trump administration ending federal regulations that had allowed states to issue Clean Air Vehicle decals, those stickers will be invalid starting Wednesday.
Frustrated North Bay commuters can take slight encouragement from the words of some Bay Area transportation officials, who point out that Caltrans could revisit the issue and tweak those HOV lane hours again.
Any such do-over, if it happens at all, is at least months away.
The California Department of Transportation imposed those expanded hours on this all-important corridor, from Richardson Bay Bridge in Marin to Windsor in Sonoma, to make the HOV lane operations consistent in both counties, and to “coordinate” them with carpool lane hours elsewhere in the Bay Area, according to Caltrans spokesman Jeff Weiss.
That explanation has failed to mollify many delayed motorists, including Santa Rosan Juan Andrade, who wrote, “This is not a one size fits all” situation. To spend so many years widening the highway, “then put such an early restriction on it — what a joke Caltrans.”
That Sept. 8 launch of the new HOV lane hours had been planned to coincide with the completion of the Marin-Sonoma Narrows widening project, part of the larger, roughly $1.5 billion lane-addition project, stretching from Windsor to Sausalito, which began at the dawn of this century.
As the last phase of the North Bay’s largest road project in a generation, it was scheduled to be finished before Caltrans unveiled the beefed-up carpool lane hours.
Due, however, to the “vagaries of construction,” and “some key materials [that] haven’t been delivered,” said Weiss of Caltrans in an emailed statement, short stretches of the 101 in northern Marin and southern Sonoma counties remain incomplete in both directions.
The Narrows, as that segment is known, still bottlenecks as traffic increases.
Those sections will be complete, and the lanes tentatively scheduled to open, as early as Monday or Tuesday, according to a Friday news release from Caltrans.
Those new hours aren’t necessarily etched in stone. They can be changed, said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which coordinates transportation systems across the nine-county Bay Area, and consulted with Caltrans on the new carpool lane hours.
“History shows that traffic patterns usually take six weeks or longer to stabilize after any kind of major operating change,” Goodwin wrote in an email.
“My guess is that Caltrans likely will want to have at least a few months of data after the closing of the carpool lane gap before recommending any change in operating hours.”
There is precedent “for (Caltrans) modifying operating hours based on real-world performance,” said Ross Clendenen, spokesperson for the Sonoma County Transportation and Climate Authorities.
That said, once the Narrows work is finished, “there is an expectation that congestion” in that corridor will be “alleviated,” Clendenen added.
As operator of the state’s highway system, Caltrans made the final call on switching the carpool lane hours. But it did so in conjunction with the MTC and the California Highway Patrol — after coordination with Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) and its Sonoma County counterpart.
Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, a board member on the county’s transportation authority, has repeatedly expressed opposition to the new hours.
“Commute patterns have changed considerably, post-COVID,” he said.
“With remote work, every weekday has a different vehicle count. The a.m./p.m. peak commute patterns have changed.”
The HOV lane hours imposed by Caltrans, he said, “do not reflect that change.”
As Rabbitt wrote in an email to a constituent, “I understand the need to coordinate Marin and Sonoma, but Caltrans went too far in my opinion by including what they describe as ‘shoulder hours’ on each end of the a.m. and p.m. commute.
“With remote work and daily traffic changes, I questioned the need to be so draconian in the now, nine-hours, that the HOV lane is operating. In short, I share your frustration and let Caltrans and MTC know.”
‘I am begging you’
The purpose of the new hours isn’t just to harmonize with other counties, noted Weiss of Caltrans.
“Extending the hours creates an incentive for single-occupancy motorists to make the switch to carpooling or bus riding,” he said. “As more people carpool and ride buses, congestion levels in the mixed-flow lanes will drop.”
The upshot on that front isn’t immediately clear. Julia Gonzalez, a spokesperson for SMART, noted Friday that “we’ve seen growing demand for commute-hour trips over the past month.”
In that time, the 5:30 a.m. southbound weekday departure out of Windsor has seen an 11% uptick in ridership, while that station’s 7:06 a.m. train has had a 7% increase.
As Gonzalez pointed out, however, it’s still too early to tell whether the new carpool hours are driving that bump in SMART ridership — which has had “a record increase” over the past several months, she said.
“We don’t yet have enough data to make a clear assessment.”
Milan Gray would love nothing more than to rely on a bus or train to get to work. But it’s not feasible for her. She’s a postpartum doula whose appointments take her to different points around the North Bay, often to southern Marin County. After the new carpool lane hours kicked in, she noticed it was taking her an extra half-hour, at least, to get from her Santa Rosa home to the East Blithedale Avenue exit in Mill Valley.
To avoid being late, she adjusted her four-hour shifts, starting them at 11 a.m., ending at 3 p.m. — just when the northbound carpool lane becomes restricted.
“Leaving Mill Valley at 3 p.m., it’s brutal,” she said. “The fastest I’ve gotten home is an hour and 20 minutes.” On Fridays, her return commute takes a full two hours.
Gray is 25 weeks pregnant. Her feet swell from sitting in traffic for that long after her shifts.
“Please, I am begging you,” she implored Caltrans, “reverse the extended hours.” They have made her commute “miserable,” she said.
“I come home exhausted and angry every day.”
Nor is carpooling an option for Steve DeLeon of Forestville, a sheet metal foreman whose work takes him all over the Bay Area. Lately he’s been commuting to a job site in Sunnyvale. To skirt the new HOV lane restrictions, he’s been hitting the road at 4 a.m.
But there’s no escaping the traffic hairball awaiting him in southern Marin County upon his return.
The 4:30 northbound carpool lane start time “was much better for me,” he said.
With the lane restrictions now kicking in at 3 p.m., he’s bumper to bumper, stop and go for much of the drive from Mill Valley to the Cotati exit, where he hops onto Highway 116.
Leaving Sunnyvale at 2:30 p.m. each day, he said, “it takes me three hours to get home.”
DeLeon has been commuting from Forestville for 25 years, looking forward for much of that time to the completion of that third lane on Highway 101.
To DeLeon, Caltrans’ decision to close that lane to many motorists for nine hours a day, almost as soon as it opened, “feels like the rug being pulled out.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On X @ausmurph88.
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