Opinion: Transportation an environmental driver
By Joanne Marchetta
There’s a lot to be learned by studying the success of others. At the Tahoe Talks Brown Bag Lunch this month, a design engineer for the Federal Highway Administration discussed how modern roundabouts are being used to improve traffic and make roads safer for drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians, as well as where they would make the most sense at Lake Tahoe.
Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and its partners started the monthly discussion series to better engage people and get all of us thinking about critical issues such as transportation and how we can work together for solutions to our biggest challenges.
Joanne Marchetta
Transportation plays a central and transformative role in restoring Lake Tahoe’s environment, revitalizing our local communities, and making our Region more sustainable. About 70 percent of the fine sediment that washes into the Lake and reduces its water clarity comes from roads and developed areas.
Fortunately, costly projects to upgrade our roads, bridges, transit systems, and bike trails can achieve multiple benefits. They can reduce traffic congestion and stormwater pollution while at the same time improving safety, air quality, pedestrian mobility, public access, scenery, parking, quality of life, and economic vitality.
TRPA is working with many partners in and out of the basin to envision, develop, and deliver the transportation system Lake Tahoe deserves.
We’re updating our TRPA Regional Transportation Plan and TRPA Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan. We’re teaming up with the Tahoe Transportation District to complete a set of comprehensive traffic corridor studies that will identify some of our biggest transportation needs.
We’re also working with Tahoe Transportation District on a long-range transit plan to improve connectivity for increased ridership. The plan will identify strategies for an integrated regional transit system with improved connections outside the Basin, and explore options for free-to-rider service.
While those major planning efforts continue, significant work is being done to upgrade roads in our communities.
Last year, California and Nevada transportation departments continued their multi-year water quality program and invested $130 million in projects to add bike lanes and reduce stormwater pollution on highway 50s, 89 and 207. That work is part of an ongoing effort to improve Lake Tahoe’s water quality by upgrading stormwater treatment on area highways.
Placer County started a $48 million project to revamp Highway 28 through the Kings Beach commercial core. The project will improve traffic flow, pedestrian access, and landscaping, and reduce fine sediment pollution into Lake Tahoe by an estimated 45,000 pounds per year.
South Lake Tahoe rebuilt Harrison Avenue with a new traffic pattern, streetlights, sidewalks, bike paths, and landscaping to revitalize that commercial corridor and reduce stormwater pollution.
TRPA’s new On Our Way grant program awarded $550,000 in federal funding for local jurisdictions, school districts, and nonprofit groups to identify neighborhood- and community-level projects that can increase walking, bicycling, and public transit use.
Progress will continue this year as El Dorado County finishes its Lake Tahoe Boulevard Enhancement Project to complete a missing link in the bike path network between South Lake Tahoe and Meyers and Tahoe Transportation District starts building a three-mile bike trail from Incline Village to Sand Harbor with $12 million in federal funding and help from the nonprofit Tahoe Fund, which raised more than $1 million in private donations for the project.
Other important projects are under environmental review and on the horizon for us to consider, including the Highway 89/Fanny Bridge Community Revitalization Project, the Highway 50/South Shore Community Revitalization Project (aka loop road), and a proposal to restore cross-lake passenger ferry service between the North Shore and South Shore.
Some of our transportation challenges are financial. We need to fix flawed transportation funding formulas that steer dollars into our Region as if it is only a little known, sparsely populated rural area and fail to recognize the millions of people who visit each year, many of them driving up from nearby metropolitan areas and putting significant demand on our infrastructure.
Roundabouts are one tool in helping to solve our transportation challenges. Much more remains to be done. And now is a crucial time for people to be informed, engaged, and vocal about what they want to see happen in the Lake Tahoe Basin because transportation is transformation.
Joanne Marchetta is executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.
A traffic engineer from Long Beach told me a few years back, when Ted Long was advocating roundabouts, that they are working very well to expedite vehicle movement and much better than conventional traffic signals at many intersections. It didn’t help Ted’s popularity and destroyed him politically. Maybe the time is right to revive his ideas.
Traffic circles as a solution to traffic and pollution, really?!?
Go BIG and go GREEN! Be BOLD!
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out where all the sediment and pollution comes from…
Begin planning light rail for the basin!
A MONORAIL
*protects the lake
*requires no snow removal (no sand/fine sediment req’d)
*gives a viable alternative to cars/reduces traffic
*boosts Tahoe’s green cred
*improves the Tahoe experience
Looks like transportation is the flavor of the Koolaid for 2015. People have started to question projects like the Fanny Bridge realignment, the Ferry, and the Loop Road, so of course a new media campaign has begun to convince the masses of how great these projects will be. Just don’t ask the locals who know the details, of course. Or think about where that $100 million+ funding will be coming from (our taxes) and who will reap the rewards (Edgewood, other resorts). Or how bad these will be for the Lake, and our local businesses.
Given that the TRPA has had multiple opportunities to improve mass transportation during it’s entire existence, but has chosen to do almost nothing, I suspect that their newfound interest has far more to do with grants than anything else. The bureaucrats are only interested in getting more money for their fortress, guards and court. I have observed their behavior since they were created, they are nothing but kingdom builders.
IMHO, roundabouts certainly have their place within the highway system, but the Y is not one of them. Mr. Long’s idea failed because that particular application will simply not work at that location.
the Marvelous Makeover marches forward.
we could change the name of the Y to the O.
Harrison ave. there is no where to plow the Snow, one of these days we are going to find that to be true.
The traffic circle in Long beach does work great, but in order for it to make scence it has to have 2 or more heave traffic roads which thestate line area does not have.
Roundabouts as built most places to USA standards are too small. Expand them as they do in Europe and they work great.
Ryan Payne & J&B, Ryan a monorail has been talked about off and on over the years but it never got off the ground (yes, bad pun intended). Traffic roundabouts? I’m not so sure about it as I’ve never been on one. At first glance it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
The proposed loop road and lake ferry are bad ideas! A ferry to north shore has been tried and it did not work due to low ticket sales and high winds making it unsafe to travel across the lake. The loop road plan will effect so many residents and business owners in a bad way; Losing your home or losing the amount of customers at your store.
But then, maybe that’s the idea! Run more people out of town, closing more schools, stores closing because of lack of sales and then just a few will be able to afford to live here who have the big bucks. Hopefully that’s not the case!!! OLS
The roundabouts in Truckee, Incline Village and Reno seem to be working well. I haven’t had trouble navigating them. I would question the wisdom of putting a roundabout at the “Y”. I don’t use public transportation because it is not convenient. Do the people that are advocating the need for more public transportation use it?
Anyone who has driven through the roundabout in Nevada on hwy 88 west of 395 can tell you it is too small. The hay trucks and other long vehicles cannot negotiate the circle without taking up the entire road, and then the trailer tires are usually on the inside curb.
Roundabouts in freezing or heavy snow conditions are difficult to plow and prove to increase the number of spin out accidents.
I just returned from Europe and experienced many small roundabouts. Curbs are deliberately left low for large trucks and emergency vehicles to navigate them. I was also in New Zealand where “roundabouts are used extensively with great success. Very little time is spent waiting for opposing traffic when used properly.
I find myself in Truckee once or twice a month and find the roundabouts there work pretty well.
Rick
Face it Round abouts in ice and snow conditions with Bay Area drivers is going to be like a figure 8 demolition derby run.
They seem to work OK in areas that don’t back-up/gridlock. I don’t see them as a large improvement to traffic flow. Many people like them because they’re so European.
Almost every time I read something by the head of TRPA she lists all the projects in the works around the Lake (or completed) by cities, counties, TTD, etc. as though these things are due to TRPA. I agree with dumbfounded. TRPA hasn’t done anything worth talking about on it’s own so it speaks in terms of “partners, regional plans and GRANTS. It’s all about the money. Take a look at the proposed Stateline area re-do map. If you think a “Health and Wellness, Visitors Center” (really!?) isn’t about grant money, you are kidding yourself. Our elected gov’t bodies need to stay out of bed with the unelected bi-state agency.
Isee, You nailed it in regards to the TRPA and the other agencies. OLS