The Elk Grove Crawl: Fast Growth Adds Up to a Very Slow Commute
By Tony Bizjak and Loretta Kalb, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Apr. 2–nice home at an affordable price. Good schools. A comfortable suburban lifestyle. That’s what sold former Bay Area resident Colin Saeger and his wife on Elk Grove four years ago.
No one, however, told Saeger about The Funnel. Now, the 40-year-old restaurant manager knows the south county’s traffic phenomenon painfully well.
Each day, he joins tens of thousands of commuters who pour out of subdivisions in Elk Grove and south Sacramento and converge on overmatched streets that funnel them fitfully onto Highway 99 and Interstate 5 northbound.
Saeger creeps 15 miles in 90 minutes to the Arden-area restaurant he manages. It’s the kind of traffic jam he thought he had left behind in San Jose.
“I’m wasting time,” he lamented. “Time I can’t spend with my children or with my wife.”
It’s become one of the region’s most tedious commutes, and a case study in unbalanced growth.
New homes sprout continually in and around Elk Grove, absorbing a growing population. But job growth has not kept up, forcing more and more south county residents to migrate north to their jobs – on increasingly overburdened roads.
Transportation planners say they are scrambling to ease the funnel effect in the next few years with a series of major road improvements, new freeway interchanges and a light-rail extension.
But they acknowledge those projects won’t fix the underlying causes of traffic congestion. In fact, some remedies might worsen commutes by paving the way for more growth.
Elk Grove is one of California’s fastest-growing cities. Last year the city counted 11,600 new residents. And 55,000 more are expected within the next two decades.
The impact on south Sacramento County’s traffic has been dramatic, turning Highway 99 between 12th Avenue and Mack Road into the most congested freeway section in the region during the evening commute.
Disgruntled commuters complain about feeling trapped. Some flee the freeways and try to wend their way along surface streets. Too often they find those just as congested.
The change is particularly jarring for people who remember the way things used to be.
Longtime Elk Grove resident Steve Burke said he used to drive to downtown Sacramento in 15 minutes. Now he takes the bus.
When he does drive, he said, it’s an exercise in precision timing.
“It used to be that I could leave work by ten (minutes) to four,” he said. “Now if I leave at 3:30, it’s all backed up. Elk Grove is just getting too big.”
The city inherited a traffic mess when it incorporated and then expanded its boundaries a few years ago, Elk Grove Mayor Rick Soares said.
“We are having to modify (roads), and that takes a long time,” Soares said.
The city has set aside $251 million for traffic relief and growth in the next five years. The projects include a $48 million interchange at what might be the worst traffic funnel in the south county, the archaic Sheldon Road interchange and access roads. A few miles south on Highway 99, a $60 million interchange and a widening of Grant Line Road are in the works. Both projects should be completed by the end of next year.
The freeway lanes, however, are controlled by the state.
State officials continue to debate a controversial statewide infrastructure bond that might bring money for freeway congestion relief to Sacramento. With or without the bond, the state transportation department plans to add diamond lanes to I-5 through the south area.
Meanwhile, Sacramento County officials are methodically upgrading two-lane farm roads between Elk Grove and Rancho Cordova into muscular four-laners to accommodate commuters who have crowded onto those roads to avoid the highways.
Sacramento officials are planning the costliest road project in city history: the $80 million I-5 interchange and extension of Cosumnes River Boulevard.
And, Regional Transit is fast-tracking a $200 million extension of the Meadowview light-rail line to Cosumnes River College.
But transportation projects are notoriously slow to complete. A big beltway road that is supposed to skirt Elk Grove, connecting I-5, Highway 99 and Highway 50, likely will be built in increments.
Neither the light-rail extension nor the Cosumnes River Boulevard extension and interchange are expected to be finished until 2010.
The city of Sacramento’s planned Cosumnes River Boulevard/I-5 interchange will reduce congestion in the short term. But it will also open a 900-acre site to a 5,000-home development called Delta Shores.
Tom Shine, a board member of the Greater Sheldon Road Estates Homeowners Association in Elk Grove, said officials need to do more to harness growth.
Either “increase the speed with which you improve the roads, or slow the growth, or a combination of each,” he said.
But south county suffers from another imbalance that is harder to correct. There are not enough jobs coming to the area to allow residents to work near their homes.
The ratio of jobs to houses in the south county is awful, said Barbara Hayes, executive director of the Sacramento Area Commerce and Trade Organization.
Sacramento County had 104 jobs for every 100 dwelling units in 2004, according to Sacramento Area Council of Governments data.
But Elk Grove had only 65 jobs for every 100 houses or apartments.
By comparison, Rancho Cordova had 227 jobs for every 100 dwelling units, Folsom had 131 and Sacramento city had 195.
Over the past two decades, large businesses flowed into Rancho Cordova, Roseville, Folsom and other areas, but the south county was slower to develop.
South county sites zoned for offices turned out to be too small to attract bigger businesses, said Sacramento County economic development official Paul Hahn. The county also allowed some office sites to be rezoned for other uses.
City officials in Elk Grove and Sacramento said they’re working to right that imbalance.
Elk Grove Mayor Soares listed new office projects, such as the Laguna Pointe office-commercial center under construction, as a solid step forward.
Sacramento city officials have their fingers crossed that the as-yet undeveloped Delta Shores area next to I-5 also can become a job center for the south county.
At the moment, developers are more interested in building homes and stores, said Sacramento’s new growth manager, Scot Mende. He said city officials will talk with developers about adding more large office sites and denser mixed-use development.
That will create a more convenient lifestyle for south county residents, reduce pollution and “reduce the need for further expensive road and freeway expansions,” Mende said.
For now, though, most commuters in the south county do not have the option of a local job. Instead they have frustration.
“Some mornings, it is just chaos,” said Dinah Gothmann, who moved to the area two years ago for a house with land.
Gothmann lives just east of Highway 99 near Bond Road. But usually she drives past the freeway – “I just don’t like 99″ – and heads several miles west to I-5. Unfortunately, she said, that route is hardly better these days.
The frustrating reality is that some days, the drive can be a piece of cake, she said, but the next day, for no reason she knows, it will be awful.
That leaves her listening intently each morning to radio traffic reports, plotting the day’s commute like a military strategist to avoid the worst of The Funnel.
If news is bad on the western front, at I-5, she might try Highway 99, or she’ll try a flanking run on surface streets, hoping that not too many others are trying the same trick.
“I didn’t appreciate (before) what people talked about when they talked about bad commutes,” she said. “Now I do.”
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A RESIDENT’S SOLUTION TO THE FUNNEL “Increase the speed with which you improve the roads, or slow the growth, or a combination of each.”
Tom Shine, a board member of the Greater Sheldon Road Estates Homeowners Association in Elk Grove
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
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