Driven on Highway 17, can attest that this is true. Change is the only thing we can be certain about and I hope we move towards a future like possible one you point out, all while still conserving the beauty of Northern California.
I don't think single family homes are evil either. However you can include both single family homes and apartments, condos and stores in the same neighborhood. The suburban neighborhood you showed is significantly denser than most american suburban neighborhoods, but it wouldn't hurt to have apartments, condos and stores mixed in, without hurting the 'neighborhood character'. Most of the people in that neighborhood are still going to driving everywhere, because they live in a neighborhood lacking commercial emenities and public transportation. You also need a certain density to justify bus and metro lines through certain areas, so the denser an area, the more public transportation it can sustainably receive.
Couple of things from a former Saratoga / San Jose resident: 1) there WAS a train from SC to SJ back in the day. The tunnel is actually still up there and was closed (but it's not a straight, high-speed tunnel and it's not usable 2) you're assuming SC exists as a bedroom community to SJ/Silicon Valley, which isn't necessarily true. It's not that people are just living in SC to drive to SJ. SC is on the coast. It's a college city. People will always be going back and forth. 3) The really issue is the mountainous terrain. It's the same reason why HSR will have to tunnel through Pacheco and through Tehachapi. If it were flat, it would only be a 15 mile freeway and it would have been built in the 1960s. But you're right - as tunnel boring technology improves, we will see more tunnels - especially here in CA.
This looks like most of the highways in the NYC metro. 1.5 lane post roads designed for horse carriages that are now 4 lane highways with people doing 70+ bumper to bumper.
@@SirGooga when I drove on it I felt like I was back home on the Saw Mill! But I think NY drivers are much more used to this kind of driving, whereas CA drivers don't seem to know how to handle it. I can't remember a single collision delay on the Saw Mill in many years of driving on it.
@@alexanderrotmenszthat's not what they're saying. You mentioned designing Santa Clara without into Manhattan or getting rid of the California lifestyle that people want. Yes while I'm happy you're advocating for more housing, we need much more than what can be allowed while staying suburban. We should allow taller apartment buildings especially in walkable areas near shops. Also suburban areas with single family homes should be able to handle 4 story apartment buildings. We should allow the amount of density that developers want to build because if there's enough demand for them to build it, we need that for our housing supply. Affordability is another question though, we should have inclusionary zoning and affordable subsidized housing as well. Market rate housing alone won't solve our housing crisis, we need a lot more of both
I guess the only problem with your density calculation was that it didnt factor in having places for people to go. Yes that was a dense suburban neighborhood, but it is still single use zoning. If anyone needs anything in that dense neighborhood they will still need to drive, leading to driving demand, parking demand and everything else anti urban. Yes, I think it is possible to densify a city without tearing down its suburban neighborhoods, but I also think that will require some parking lots to become higher density mixed use developments and the abolishment of single family zoning.
Commercial zoning for the most part should be mixed use anyways like it is in most European cities, so it actually still works within the calculation. Also, technically, with the density being 4.5 times more in that neighborhood than San Jose as a whole, then I could have projected a 9 mil pop for San Jose, but I said 5-6 to give plenty of leeway for what you’re talking about.
As your density increases you can toss in some mixed use “main streets” get those people grocery stores, restaurants and everything else within comfortable walking, biking distance and you can still keep those car trips low.
That was going to be my main comment as well. I understand the point is that we don't have to eliminate single family housing to create great urbanism, but I think that neighborhood is still too car centric. With good zoning, you should be able to create a neighborhood that doesn't require a garage in front of each house, and gives a bit more variation in the streetscape itself.
@@alexanderrotmensz I guess to my point without single family zoning (R1 in most american cities) people who have the choice to build what they need and upgrade when needed as well. Whether thats to mixed use, denser housing, or just getting a business permit out of your garage.
I remember driving on 17 once and I didn't feel like it was that bad. But that's only because I'm used to deranged highways like the Saw Mill in NY and US Rt 1 in MA.
This is a great video, thank you for posting! We need to highlight the fact that there is already a train tunnel and line along highway 9. Yes, it would cost millions to rehabilitate it, but it’s possible. It ran seasonally in the summer until 1959.
Are used to live in the Santa Cruz mountains. And whenever I drove “over the hill” (Highway 17) to San Jose, I used all of my concentration for the entire 30 minutes or so, practically white knuckling it as I made my way, because that road is very dangerous. Especially with the other vehicles driving way too fast and not taking the curves very well.
I remember driving this before they put in the concrete barrier between the traffic lanes. It used to be just a double yellow line. We used to call it the death road.
The reason why people choose to live in Santa Cruz is not because of housing price and housing shortage of the silicon valley. It is because people want to live near the Pacific Ocean. For them, living by the beach is worth the longer and more dangerous commute on Highway 17
Santa Cruz County has approx. 260,000 residents, not even counting all the tourists sometimes present, nor consider the potential of the many housing units that spend most of their time empty as second homes or vacation rentals. The Capitola Mall and adjacent shopping centers are ripe for development overhaul, which could easily double the population of the city of Capitola, though even further necessitating a redesign of the Hwy 1-41st Ave-Bay/Porter dual interchange (which is well overdue, anyhow). Same scenario for the east side of Freedom Blvd in Freedom and Watsonville, which is nothing but barely-used asphalt and empty stores, That whole stretch could stand to be redeveloped to house another three thousand people with plenty of store spaces for which local businesses should get priority, rather than chains alone. The Kmart and adjacent vacant areas could be a bustling mixed-use neighborhood. There are several additional large vacant lots just west of there, empty land all around the DMV, and a sprawling mostly single-level self-storage facility right next to one of the old cemeteries. Downtown Watsonville was never fully rebuilt after the 1989 earthquake, so continues to have great potential for housing with some mixed use, especially that ghastly parking lot between the transit center and Ace Hardware. Stick three or four 6-8 story residential buildings in there with a nice public garage. In fact, downtown should require any new buildings on Main or adjacent streets to include at least three floors of housing. I've never understood why there are no penthouses around here. That's crazy. The transit plaza itself should have housing. Tear down that CVS and build OVER Rodriguez. Okay, I'm a fount of ideas, apparently. Continue with your lives.
If you haven’t explored it yet, look at North First Street (and Zanker) in San Jose, particularly north of 101. It’s got light rail transit (and a good road) but a lot of midrise housing now as well.
Sounds like a massive driving skill issue imo. Drivers are just stupid, I drove it everyday for 4 years in highschool, and both my parents drove it for over 40 years without an accident. Don't drive beyond you limit, keep an aware eye and slow down in the rain and you'll be fine.
I disagree. My father made the commute up Highway 17 daily for his Silicon Valley job in the 80s and 90s. The way he tells it, the traffic and deadliness has always been this way. The problem is the road. Until there is a good public transit alternative or the road is improved, there will always be these problems.
There use to be a rail line between Los gatos and Santa cruz, but was abandoned in the 1940s. There still is tunnels, and some original track bed, but will need alot of work and new alignments, around lexingtoin resovoir, and Los gatos, if that was a plan going forward as an alternative to highway 17.
We have interstate highways to connect places, they are safe good roads. State roads on the other hand are incredibly dangerous as they are not held to the same standards as interstates. While having a rail connection or better bus service is good, there will still need to be a road connection between the two places. These places seem populous enough to warrant an interstate connection. In my state of Pennsylvania, our state highways account for over half of all deaths, and the interstates are several times safer. Still not as safe as the Bus, Train, or Plane but interstate driving is the safest you can do.
You laud that dense suburban neighborhood but it's still a single use zone with a street layout that dumps all its traffic on the nearest collector or arterial. This sort of development still enslaves people to their cars. What's needed are sensible traditional street layouts, small-scale commercial, some 2-family and 3 family homes, and some missing middle housing, i.e., rowhouses and 4 to 20 unit apartment buildings.
I completely agree with you! This was more so to show that even with purely single family homes, San Jose has the ability to house triple or even quadruple its population.
How feasible is it to build a tunnel not only through a mountain range, but also passing through an active fault line? I'm no engineer but I imagine that would be quite a challenge.
From my understanding, tunnels through fault lines are actually safer than surface structures because the wave generally passes through them. It's like being underwater in the ocean, a tsunami wave can be traveling at high speeds, but you'd never feel it because you're in the water. Now if the earthquake causes the mountain to break apart, that's a different story.
Santa Cruz County's population is actually over a quarter million, It's just that there are only 4 incorporated cities, collectively holding a little under half the total population.
@@alexanderrotmensz Well, yes. Because Watsonville is part of Santa Cruz County. By the way, none of my comments here are meant to be haughty or hostile, so apologies up front if it comes off that way. Plain text is like that when it can be construed as confrontational. I've just been in the region for 49 of my 55 years, half here in SCRUZ County, grew up mostly in Monterey (though only lived inside the city of Monterey for a few months). Watsonville is inextricably part of the county, more than ever, since so many people I know have had to move that direction to afford to stay here. Because it's the habit of county residents to use Santa Cruz as a rather vague term, we have to consciously remember to add "County" when talking about it so as not to confuse nonresidents or newcomers. It's the same with "Monterey" covering anything from Carmel Highlands to Marina and San Benancio Canyon, or San Jose for anything south of Palo Alto or Fremont and north of Morgan Hill, despite half that population NOT living in the city of San Jose. If anything, the county is slowly dividing along the peak snarls on Highway 1, currently worst from about Morrissey to the Capitola Road overpass, though here in Aptos it's getting ridiculous. Intracounty traffic is horrendous and has been for decades, made worse by the overzealous blocking of anything smacking of growth, however responsible the design. I've never been able to locate it, but I believe it was City on a Hill Press, circa 1989, that published an article that was a long list of things to do when stuck in traffic on Highway 17. No few of them involved getting out of the car (jokes, of course, but not impossible activities on a beach day). It was hilarious; but I didn't think to keep it at the time. There's probably an archive at McHenry; I've just never taken the time to look. Hmm, come to think of it, my housemate works there (losing 2 hours of her life each day to commuting, more than half that to overcapacity traffic). Anyway, back during the dot-com boom, 17 traffic was stop-and-go all the way to Watsonville, far worse than even now; and that after some significant safety and reliability improvements to 17. The completion of the interchange at the red barn (San Juan Road) also made that route much safer and alleviated pressure through Chittendon Pass (Hwy 129). That's a lot of extra miles people are traveling just to get around. After the '89 quake, it took an hour to get home at Soquel Dr and Main St in Soquel from UCSC at almost any time of day, because several bridges were out, forcing all traffic to consolidate on Soquel and Hwy 1. All of Midcounty is served by a total of only five lanes of traffic through the various natural bottlenecks (okay, 7, west of the Soquel Dr interchange, since that widening finally happened). I live in Aptos now and avoid anything beyond Bay/Porter if I can get it in Watsonville (and from chatting with many other people, they do the same), because those five extra miles can't remotely compare to the time lost to traffic between here and Western Drive. I went to UCSC as well, so I'm well aware how people who live in town, especially on the West Side, tend to ignore much of the rest of the county; and that UCSC students don't get a handle on the dynamics of the area unless they move into town far enough east and participate as townies. While the county certainly has very distinct neighborhoods and towns, it's all one, and has all been a commuter suburb since Silicon Valley became a thing. All the area from Target on Watsonville's Main St and the old Watsonville hospital site at Airport and Green Valley has filled in mostly with commuters and retirees from the other side of the hill. It's not just for tech jobs that people commute, either. My first grade teacher in Edenvale (San Jose) commuted from Santa Cruz County, back in 1975. My landlord when I lived in an attached studio apartment just north of Freedom was also a teacher who commuted for three decades, told me it was worth earning twice the pay as could be had anywhere in Santa Cruz County. Almost everyone I see on any regular basis that works in Santa Cruz, Capitola, or in between has told me they also live in Aptos or Watsonville, because it's too expensive to live where you work if both are in the county. All that extra traffic shares the road with 17 commuters. A train bore would be amazing, and a train through the length of the county even more awesome. There even are some stretches where a commuter train could go underground in developed areas rather than use the rail-trail right-of-way. There are resource issues for population growth here, though. All our water comes from the County streams and aquifers, plus Pescadero Creek up the coast. We already draw more than we should. Desalination can only do so much without harming the Bay. Fortunately, Monterey Bay's numerous learning and ocean research institutions make it one of the best places to encourage technology innovation toward ecologically safe desalination and water reuse. Monterey County has more options for piping cleaned water upstream to compensate for Carmel and Salinas watershed draws; but Santa Cruz is far more limited. We can accommodate some growth; however, we may have to eventually join the state's water system. Only then could we justify the growth that would in turn justify expensive transit solutions. Can you imagine what a boon it would be, though, if beachgoers in the Santa Clara Valley could just hop on a train here and back? That's essentially what the old trains to Pacific Grove and Santa Cruz did, with stops in Monterey, the old hotel where the Naval Postgraduate School is now, and "Camp Capitola." There are plans in the works that Monterey County has moved further along on developing to restore some of that service for both tourism and commuting purposes. I've been told since I was a little kid to go into Urban Planning; but I said that nobody would hire me because I dream too big while strongly ecologically responsible. Now in my 50s, I see my mistake: there has been interest, with too few trained to solve logistics and sell the dream, and I'm not part of it. Alas, instead I wax imaginative on my home computer. Lucky you. 🤣 Gudgawd if anybody but the video poster has read this far, you must be really bored. Leave the house. Get some exercise.
Grew up driving this road, going down from the summit people underestimate how long the turns are, and the ones who don’t follow the rule of the left lane being the fast lane cause the most issues
I feel like most of the costs of boring that tunnel can be avoided. The highway has created a perfectly viable right of way. A BRT or median rail along 17, connecting to a commuter rail/Bart station in the South Bay, might be a good temp fix in the meantime.
Exclusionary zoning should be abolished entirely. We need much more denser housing in the US
Driven on Highway 17, can attest that this is true. Change is the only thing we can be certain about and I hope we move towards a future like possible one you point out, all while still conserving the beauty of Northern California.
Easy have proper heavy rail service.
That’s how u can fix traffic problems.
Look at Australia and Europe.
I don't think single family homes are evil either. However you can include both single family homes and apartments, condos and stores in the same neighborhood. The suburban neighborhood you showed is significantly denser than most american suburban neighborhoods, but it wouldn't hurt to have apartments, condos and stores mixed in, without hurting the 'neighborhood character'. Most of the people in that neighborhood are still going to driving everywhere, because they live in a neighborhood lacking commercial emenities and public transportation. You also need a certain density to justify bus and metro lines through certain areas, so the denser an area, the more public transportation it can sustainably receive.
I generally agree with you. I would say that a high street with stores and condos alongside the neighborhood in the video would be perfect
I mean, that kind of density in the suburbs of San José *with* skyscrapers downtown and tons of apartments along major corridors would also be good.
That's the idea :)
Couple of things from a former Saratoga / San Jose resident: 1) there WAS a train from SC to SJ back in the day. The tunnel is actually still up there and was closed (but it's not a straight, high-speed tunnel and it's not usable 2) you're assuming SC exists as a bedroom community to SJ/Silicon Valley, which isn't necessarily true. It's not that people are just living in SC to drive to SJ. SC is on the coast. It's a college city. People will always be going back and forth. 3) The really issue is the mountainous terrain. It's the same reason why HSR will have to tunnel through Pacheco and through Tehachapi. If it were flat, it would only be a 15 mile freeway and it would have been built in the 1960s. But you're right - as tunnel boring technology improves, we will see more tunnels - especially here in CA.
Problem: Getting around the Bay Area is hard.
Solution: Build more BART.
Build more BART. Every. Single. Time. No exceptions.
Into BART expansion for sure, but make BART safe and clean. Also, Santa Cruz is a bit farther out- It'll need a higher speed link.
SF and existing BART are about 65 miles or so from Santa Cruz. What in the hell are you talking about?
A lot of urbanists shout for everyone to live in skyscrapers? Nooo, buddy they do not
This looks like most of the highways in the NYC metro. 1.5 lane post roads designed for horse carriages that are now 4 lane highways with people doing 70+ bumper to bumper.
Yup. Looked like the Jackie Robinson to me.
@@SirGooga when I drove on it I felt like I was back home on the Saw Mill! But I think NY drivers are much more used to this kind of driving, whereas CA drivers don't seem to know how to handle it. I can't remember a single collision delay on the Saw Mill in many years of driving on it.
Nobody is turning Santa Clara county into Manhattan, and what's wrong with apartment buildings? This is NIMBY rhetoric.
Tripling the population of San Jose at minimum is NIMBY?
@@alexanderrotmenszthat's not what they're saying. You mentioned designing Santa Clara without into Manhattan or getting rid of the California lifestyle that people want. Yes while I'm happy you're advocating for more housing, we need much more than what can be allowed while staying suburban. We should allow taller apartment buildings especially in walkable areas near shops. Also suburban areas with single family homes should be able to handle 4 story apartment buildings. We should allow the amount of density that developers want to build because if there's enough demand for them to build it, we need that for our housing supply. Affordability is another question though, we should have inclusionary zoning and affordable subsidized housing as well. Market rate housing alone won't solve our housing crisis, we need a lot more of both
Why are people needing to use the highway in the first place? Poor zoning and land use.
Highway 17 is no pleasure. I could not agree with you more than I already do.
i’m only gonna say this once
REOPEN THE SOUTH PACIFIC COAST RAILROAD, FOR REVENUE SERVICE, BETWEEN LOS GATOS AND OLYMPIA!!!!!!!!
I guess the only problem with your density calculation was that it didnt factor in having places for people to go. Yes that was a dense suburban neighborhood, but it is still single use zoning. If anyone needs anything in that dense neighborhood they will still need to drive, leading to driving demand, parking demand and everything else anti urban. Yes, I think it is possible to densify a city without tearing down its suburban neighborhoods, but I also think that will require some parking lots to become higher density mixed use developments and the abolishment of single family zoning.
Commercial zoning for the most part should be mixed use anyways like it is in most European cities, so it actually still works within the calculation. Also, technically, with the density being 4.5 times more in that neighborhood than San Jose as a whole, then I could have projected a 9 mil pop for San Jose, but I said 5-6 to give plenty of leeway for what you’re talking about.
As your density increases you can toss in some mixed use “main streets” get those people grocery stores, restaurants and everything else within comfortable walking, biking distance and you can still keep those car trips low.
That was going to be my main comment as well. I understand the point is that we don't have to eliminate single family housing to create great urbanism, but I think that neighborhood is still too car centric. With good zoning, you should be able to create a neighborhood that doesn't require a garage in front of each house, and gives a bit more variation in the streetscape itself.
@@alexanderrotmensz I guess to my point without single family zoning (R1 in most american cities) people who have the choice to build what they need and upgrade when needed as well. Whether thats to mixed use, denser housing, or just getting a business permit out of your garage.
I remember driving on 17 once and I didn't feel like it was that bad. But that's only because I'm used to deranged highways like the Saw Mill in NY and US Rt 1 in MA.
This is a great video, thank you for posting! We need to highlight the fact that there is already a train tunnel and line along highway 9. Yes, it would cost millions to rehabilitate it, but it’s possible. It ran seasonally in the summer until 1959.
There’s actually another corridor closer to the 17 highway that has tunnels and such. They tore it out in 1941 because of high waters
You show you’re a Southern California fella. It’s not “the 17”.
Are used to live in the Santa Cruz mountains. And whenever I drove “over the hill” (Highway 17) to San Jose, I used all of my concentration for the entire 30 minutes or so, practically white knuckling it as I made my way, because that road is very dangerous. Especially with the other vehicles driving way too fast and not taking the curves very well.
I remember driving this before they put in the concrete barrier between the traffic lanes. It used to be just a double yellow line. We used to call it the death road.
that is insane, not having a barrier. i would never drive 17 like that
The reason why people choose to live in Santa Cruz is not because of housing price and housing shortage of the silicon valley. It is because people want to live near the Pacific Ocean. For them, living by the beach is worth the longer and more dangerous commute on Highway 17
Santa Cruz County has approx. 260,000 residents, not even counting all the tourists sometimes present, nor consider the potential of the many housing units that spend most of their time empty as second homes or vacation rentals. The Capitola Mall and adjacent shopping centers are ripe for development overhaul, which could easily double the population of the city of Capitola, though even further necessitating a redesign of the Hwy 1-41st Ave-Bay/Porter dual interchange (which is well overdue, anyhow). Same scenario for the east side of Freedom Blvd in Freedom and Watsonville, which is nothing but barely-used asphalt and empty stores, That whole stretch could stand to be redeveloped to house another three thousand people with plenty of store spaces for which local businesses should get priority, rather than chains alone. The Kmart and adjacent vacant areas could be a bustling mixed-use neighborhood. There are several additional large vacant lots just west of there, empty land all around the DMV, and a sprawling mostly single-level self-storage facility right next to one of the old cemeteries. Downtown Watsonville was never fully rebuilt after the 1989 earthquake, so continues to have great potential for housing with some mixed use, especially that ghastly parking lot between the transit center and Ace Hardware. Stick three or four 6-8 story residential buildings in there with a nice public garage. In fact, downtown should require any new buildings on Main or adjacent streets to include at least three floors of housing. I've never understood why there are no penthouses around here. That's crazy. The transit plaza itself should have housing. Tear down that CVS and build OVER Rodriguez. Okay, I'm a fount of ideas, apparently. Continue with your lives.
If you haven’t explored it yet, look at North First Street (and Zanker) in San Jose, particularly north of 101. It’s got light rail transit (and a good road) but a lot of midrise housing now as well.
Sounds like a massive driving skill issue imo. Drivers are just stupid, I drove it everyday for 4 years in highschool, and both my parents drove it for over 40 years without an accident. Don't drive beyond you limit, keep an aware eye and slow down in the rain and you'll be fine.
I disagree. My father made the commute up Highway 17 daily for his Silicon Valley job in the 80s and 90s. The way he tells it, the traffic and deadliness has always been this way. The problem is the road. Until there is a good public transit alternative or the road is improved, there will always be these problems.
Toll 17 to build a raillink.
You OBVIOUSLY do not live in that area, or you would never say that.
There use to be a rail line between Los gatos and Santa cruz, but was abandoned in the 1940s. There still is tunnels, and some original track bed, but will need alot of work and new alignments, around lexingtoin resovoir, and Los gatos, if that was a plan going forward as an alternative to highway 17.
Ohh really so a rapid line is easier than I thought
We have interstate highways to connect places, they are safe good roads. State roads on the other hand are incredibly dangerous as they are not held to the same standards as interstates. While having a rail connection or better bus service is good, there will still need to be a road connection between the two places. These places seem populous enough to warrant an interstate connection. In my state of Pennsylvania, our state highways account for over half of all deaths, and the interstates are several times safer. Still not as safe as the Bus, Train, or Plane but interstate driving is the safest you can do.
You laud that dense suburban neighborhood but it's still a single use zone with a street layout that dumps all its traffic on the nearest collector or arterial. This sort of development still enslaves people to their cars. What's needed are sensible traditional street layouts, small-scale commercial, some 2-family and 3 family homes, and some missing middle housing, i.e., rowhouses and 4 to 20 unit apartment buildings.
I completely agree with you! This was more so to show that even with purely single family homes, San Jose has the ability to house triple or even quadruple its population.
Dangerous life
UCSC STUDENT!!!!!!!
How feasible is it to build a tunnel not only through a mountain range, but also passing through an active fault line? I'm no engineer but I imagine that would be quite a challenge.
There are base tunnels all through the alps and Japan, and Japan specifically is much more intense fault line. It just has to be economically viable
From my understanding, tunnels through fault lines are actually safer than surface structures because the wave generally passes through them. It's like being underwater in the ocean, a tsunami wave can be traveling at high speeds, but you'd never feel it because you're in the water.
Now if the earthquake causes the mountain to break apart, that's a different story.
@@alexanderrotmenszif you build it people will come maglev can do it easier
One thing is for sure: I'm never living in San Jose
BTW editing is definitely getting better bro
7:49 looks like any rural place in the US
4:00 dissapointing to see single family homes in the distance
Nothing wrong with those per se, but yeah definitely a lot of wasted space
5:16 oh WOW
Santa Cruz County's population is actually over a quarter million, It's just that there are only 4 incorporated cities, collectively holding a little under half the total population.
quarter million includes watsonville
@@alexanderrotmensz Well, yes. Because Watsonville is part of Santa Cruz County. By the way, none of my comments here are meant to be haughty or hostile, so apologies up front if it comes off that way. Plain text is like that when it can be construed as confrontational. I've just been in the region for 49 of my 55 years, half here in SCRUZ County, grew up mostly in Monterey (though only lived inside the city of Monterey for a few months).
Watsonville is inextricably part of the county, more than ever, since so many people I know have had to move that direction to afford to stay here. Because it's the habit of county residents to use Santa Cruz as a rather vague term, we have to consciously remember to add "County" when talking about it so as not to confuse nonresidents or newcomers. It's the same with "Monterey" covering anything from Carmel Highlands to Marina and San Benancio Canyon, or San Jose for anything south of Palo Alto or Fremont and north of Morgan Hill, despite half that population NOT living in the city of San Jose.
If anything, the county is slowly dividing along the peak snarls on Highway 1, currently worst from about Morrissey to the Capitola Road overpass, though here in Aptos it's getting ridiculous. Intracounty traffic is horrendous and has been for decades, made worse by the overzealous blocking of anything smacking of growth, however responsible the design. I've never been able to locate it, but I believe it was City on a Hill Press, circa 1989, that published an article that was a long list of things to do when stuck in traffic on Highway 17. No few of them involved getting out of the car (jokes, of course, but not impossible activities on a beach day). It was hilarious; but I didn't think to keep it at the time. There's probably an archive at McHenry; I've just never taken the time to look. Hmm, come to think of it, my housemate works there (losing 2 hours of her life each day to commuting, more than half that to overcapacity traffic).
Anyway, back during the dot-com boom, 17 traffic was stop-and-go all the way to Watsonville, far worse than even now; and that after some significant safety and reliability improvements to 17. The completion of the interchange at the red barn (San Juan Road) also made that route much safer and alleviated pressure through Chittendon Pass (Hwy 129). That's a lot of extra miles people are traveling just to get around.
After the '89 quake, it took an hour to get home at Soquel Dr and Main St in Soquel from UCSC at almost any time of day, because several bridges were out, forcing all traffic to consolidate on Soquel and Hwy 1. All of Midcounty is served by a total of only five lanes of traffic through the various natural bottlenecks (okay, 7, west of the Soquel Dr interchange, since that widening finally happened). I live in Aptos now and avoid anything beyond Bay/Porter if I can get it in Watsonville (and from chatting with many other people, they do the same), because those five extra miles can't remotely compare to the time lost to traffic between here and Western Drive.
I went to UCSC as well, so I'm well aware how people who live in town, especially on the West Side, tend to ignore much of the rest of the county; and that UCSC students don't get a handle on the dynamics of the area unless they move into town far enough east and participate as townies.
While the county certainly has very distinct neighborhoods and towns, it's all one, and has all been a commuter suburb since Silicon Valley became a thing. All the area from Target on Watsonville's Main St and the old Watsonville hospital site at Airport and Green Valley has filled in mostly with commuters and retirees from the other side of the hill. It's not just for tech jobs that people commute, either. My first grade teacher in Edenvale (San Jose) commuted from Santa Cruz County, back in 1975. My landlord when I lived in an attached studio apartment just north of Freedom was also a teacher who commuted for three decades, told me it was worth earning twice the pay as could be had anywhere in Santa Cruz County. Almost everyone I see on any regular basis that works in Santa Cruz, Capitola, or in between has told me they also live in Aptos or Watsonville, because it's too expensive to live where you work if both are in the county. All that extra traffic shares the road with 17 commuters.
A train bore would be amazing, and a train through the length of the county even more awesome. There even are some stretches where a commuter train could go underground in developed areas rather than use the rail-trail right-of-way. There are resource issues for population growth here, though. All our water comes from the County streams and aquifers, plus Pescadero Creek up the coast. We already draw more than we should. Desalination can only do so much without harming the Bay. Fortunately, Monterey Bay's numerous learning and ocean research institutions make it one of the best places to encourage technology innovation toward ecologically safe desalination and water reuse. Monterey County has more options for piping cleaned water upstream to compensate for Carmel and Salinas watershed draws; but Santa Cruz is far more limited. We can accommodate some growth; however, we may have to eventually join the state's water system. Only then could we justify the growth that would in turn justify expensive transit solutions. Can you imagine what a boon it would be, though, if beachgoers in the Santa Clara Valley could just hop on a train here and back? That's essentially what the old trains to Pacific Grove and Santa Cruz did, with stops in Monterey, the old hotel where the Naval Postgraduate School is now, and "Camp Capitola." There are plans in the works that Monterey County has moved further along on developing to restore some of that service for both tourism and commuting purposes.
I've been told since I was a little kid to go into Urban Planning; but I said that nobody would hire me because I dream too big while strongly ecologically responsible. Now in my 50s, I see my mistake: there has been interest, with too few trained to solve logistics and sell the dream, and I'm not part of it. Alas, instead I wax imaginative on my home computer. Lucky you. 🤣 Gudgawd if anybody but the video poster has read this far, you must be really bored. Leave the house. Get some exercise.
Nice case study, keep it up!
Grew up driving this road, going down from the summit people underestimate how long the turns are, and the ones who don’t follow the rule of the left lane being the fast lane cause the most issues
I feel like most of the costs of boring that tunnel can be avoided. The highway has created a perfectly viable right of way. A BRT or median rail along 17, connecting to a commuter rail/Bart station in the South Bay, might be a good temp fix in the meantime.