Your trip on Interstate 80 will soon cost more
Toll roads are coming to Solano County's main freeway, whether you like it or not.
(Photo courtesy City of Fairfield via Twitter.com)
If the cost of gas is causing a strain on your wallet, here’s some bad news for you: That daily commute is about to get a lot worse.
On Monday, elected officials from throughout Solano County and their counterparts with the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) met at Peña Adobe Park in Vacaville to “break ground” on the region’s latest infrastructure improvement project.
The event was linked to construction occurring on nearby Interstate 80 where for the last two weeks workers along the westbound portion of the freeway have been installing a framework to create a new “managed” or “express” lane there.
The work is part of a broader project where one lane of the freeway in each direction will be converted into an express lane. In Fairfield, existing carpool lanes will be converted into express lanes; in Vacaville, a new lane of freeway will be constructed that will be activated as an express lane.
The express lanes come after similar ones were activated in other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, where non-carpoolers are asked to pay a fee in order to use them. Those who do carpool can sometimes use the express lanes for free, while other express lanes come at a discount for those who travel with two or more people. Fees are collected through a car’s FasTrak toll tag, with amounts set based on the time of day, amount of congestion on a road and other factors.
It was not clear from project proposals and other documents reviewed by Solano NewsNet how much CalTrans intends to charge motorists who want to use the express lanes in Vacaville and Fairfield once they’re up and running, but transit officials estimate the toll lanes will bring in at least $10 million in revenue every year.
(Image courtesy CalTrans; Graphic by Solano NewsNet)
The project itself will be funded through a grant of over $123 million from the Trade Corridor Enhancement Program (TCEP), which itself is funded by state and federal tax revenues.
Transit officials say the toll lanes are needed because of existing bottlenecks on Interstate 80, especially during peak travel time. That congestion not only makes commutes longer, but it impacts public transit systems like SolanoExpress and makes it difficult for emergency vehicles to get to a crash or other incident when it occurs on the freeway.
A fact sheet published by the Solano Transportation Authority said there have been no major Interstate 80 widening projects since the early 1970s, though a newspaper column published in 2006 and reviewed by Solano NewsNet stated one widening project did take place in Cordelia around 2006.
The column made the point that, at least back then, there was not a single carpool lane to be found on Interstate 80, even though data collected by county officials showed the region had a high number of carpooling motorists.
Nearly two decades later, there’s an abundance of carpool lanes on Interstate 80 through the Fairfield area, but transit officials say local populations coupled with an increase in commuters going to jobs in Sacramento and San Francisco are creating traffic that even the carpool lanes can’t handle.
Experts think tolling lanes will encourage some commuters to take advantage of mass transit like SolTrans, which offers bus services between Fairfield and Richmond, or the Amtrak Capitol Corridor between Auburn and San Jose.
The project is expected to be completed later this year. Transit officials are hoping to eventually expand managed lanes north into Yolo County and south to the Carquinez Bridge.
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