A great plan, which after the resistance, and refining to meet that resistance, work is done, should make a great addition to our driving.
More carpool lanes: The right path?
By Tony Bizjak - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Monday, February 5, 2007
Day after day, when they drive home from work, Cathy Bishop of Granite Bay and her carpooling partners hit a wall.
It happens on Interstate 80 at the Placer County line. The carpool lane just dissolves, leaving them stuck against a mass of clogged traffic.
In desperation, Bishop's group now abandons the freeway miles early, finishing the commute through city streets.
"Absolutely ridiculous," said Bishop, an otherwise upbeat state employee. "There has got to be a better way."
That lament is common among Sacramento carpoolers.
Seventeen years after the first carpool lanes were rolled out in Sacramento, they remain a patchwork, offering limited time savings on increasingly congested roadways.
Highway planners say a major fix is in order.
In possibly the most ambitious transportation proposal in generations, officials plan to add 50 more miles of carpool lanes, knitting Sacramento's freeways into a "seamless" system.
Exclusive "flyover" bridges, separated from regular traffic lanes, would allow carpoolers and commuter buses to swoop from one freeway to the next -- no merging -- turning Sacramento carpooling into the road version of first-class flying.
The network is one of a series of major projects being proposed that promise to dramatically redraw the region's travel map.
