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New carpool lane hours are coming next month to Highway 101 in Sonoma and Marin counties, Caltrans announced Wednesday.
Beginning in late February, high occupancy vehicle hours will be 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The new schedule, based on a Caltrans traffic analysis this month, will cover the stretch between the Richardson Bay Bridge in Marin County and Windsor in Sonoma County.
The timing will depend on the completion of new signs and weather conditions, according to Caltrans.
“With this decision, the transportation partners remain committed to providing carpool lanes and encouraging transit in the North Bay while helping to relieve congestion on the US-101 corridor,” Caltrans officials said in a news release.
The update follows a previous, highly unpopular change to HOV hours in September, which contributed to congestion and delays through parts of Highway 101. Hours, at the time, had been extended from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the morning, and in the evening from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Prior to September, carpool hours in Marin were 6:30 to 8:30 a.m. in the southbound lanes and 4:30 to 7 p.m. for the northbound lanes. In Sonoma County, the hours were 7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6:30 p.m. in both directions.
Given the unpopular hours were still in effect Wednesday, Santa Rosa resident Deborah Padovan hit the road at 5 a.m. to get to Los Atos Hills where she retired as a city clerk but occasionally helps out. She would’ve left Santa Rosa bout 30 minutes later if not for the current carpool hours, which she called “ridiculous.”
Speaking to The Press Democrat during her drive home, Padovan crossed the Golden Gate Bridge just after 3 p.m. and anticipated hitting traffic through Marin County. She left Los Altos Hills about 2:05 p.m. as a precaution, but said “I don’t think I left early enough.”
Steve DeLeon of Forestville, until recently a sheet metal foreman whose work took him all over the Bay Area, said he’s “glad” Caltrans is taking this step, but believes it doesn’t go far enough.
“I think those hours are still a little off,” said DeLeon, who was commuting to a job site in Sunnyvale when the existing HOV lane hours were imposed in September.
To avoid congestion created by those new strictures, he was on the road by 4 a.m. many mornings.
But there was no escaping the gummed up traffic on his return trip. With carpool lane hours starting at 3 p.m., rather than 4:30, as before, he lurched along in stop-and-go traffic from Mill Valley to the Cotati exit, where he’d hop onto Highway 116.
That commute home, which sometimes stretched to three hours, was among the primary reasons DeLeon retired in December.
The tweaked hours announced Wednesday, he noted, would be no help to him on that return trip. Caltrans was being “too careful,” he said, by changing the hours “just a little.”
Chelsea Schlunt wholeheartedly agrees. She owns Novato-based Bellows Plumbing, Heating, Cooling and Electrical, serving Sonoma and Marin counties.
Caltrans’ trims of the existing carpool lane hours “aren’t meaningful enough,” said Schlunt, who remains puzzled – and angry – about why the hours were altered in the first place.
“I’m confused why they felt the need to fix something that wasn’t broken.”
Under the current arrangement, she said, her company’s technicians are having to leave home earlier. “They’re late to jobs, pushing us into overtime, costing me more in payroll.” The onerous hours are “costly to businesses bottom lines, she said.
That 3 p.m. start time for HOV lane hours “is still too early,” she said. “There is traffic now where there never used to be traffic. Taking kids to events after school on Highway 101 has become really difficult.”
With the start time staying at 3 p.m., she believes, it’s not going to become less difficult.
Caltrans imposed the expanded hours in September to coincide with the completion of the Marin-Sonoma Narrows widening project, which added a third lane north and south on the 16-mile stretch of Highway 101 between Novato and Petaluma.
The shift in HOV hours unleashed withering criticism from motorists, as first reported by The Press Democrat, and complaints from numerous lawmakers in Sonoma and Marin counties.
By December, amid sustained public pressure, Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission announced HOV hours would be scaled back.
“We asked and Caltrans listened, the new hours will maintain our commitment to encouraging carpooling and transit use while also avoiding hours of unnecessary gridlock for North Bay commuters,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, chair of the Sonoma County Transportation and Climate Authorities. “I appreciate the partnership we have with Caltrans, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Transportation Authority of Marin to implement the updated Carpool hours for Sonoma and Marin.”
You can reach Staff Writer Colin Atagi at colin.atagi@pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.
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