Freeway construction to slow traffic for years

<p>The completed six lanes of Highway 101 through Santa Rosa brought a welcome end to the years of bumper-to-bumper grind in favor of smooth sailing through the downtown corridor and quick access to downtown locations.</p><p>But with highway projects now bookending the city north to Windsor and south to Rohnert Park, getting out of town means a return to the bad old days. For years.</p><p>“Construction is going to impact traffic much the same way it did during the previous job in downtown Santa Rosa ... it will cause some delay,” said Seana Gause of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority.</p><p>To the south of Santa Rosa, work has started to replace the Wilfred Avenue overpass and widen Highway 101 in Rohnert Park, a $38 million Ghilotti Brothers project that is expected to be completed in August 2012.</p><p>To the north, O.C. Jones Inc. of Berkeley is widening the freeway from Steele Lane to the central Windsor exit, a $77.8 million project to be completed in the fall of 2010.</p><p>With a 55-mph speed limit in place and concrete safety barriers funneling traffic through the seven-mile-long construction zone, traffic is stop-and-go during the commute hours north and south and can crawl the remainder of the day.</p><p>“It has slowed quite a bit, and I don’t know if it is construction or the heavy surveillance by police. ... A lot of people have gotten tickets. My wife got a ticket,” said Steve Allen, a Windsor councilman who commutes to Santa Rosa for his job with Santa Rosa’s utility department.</p><p>Additional lanes will be added south of Santa Rosa from where the car-pool lane now ends at Santa Rosa Avenue to the Rohnert Park Expressway, with the Wilfred overpass being replaced and on- and off-ramps reconfigured.</p><p>Gause said motorists will need to be patient.</p><p>“The citizens of Santa Rosa got behind the construction and weathered the storm, that is what we are asking the rest of the county at this point,” Gause said. “There is short-term impact for long term gain.”</p><p>Workers this past week erected safety barriers, moved in heavy equipment and have begun removing dirt on the west side of the freeway.</p><p>Even before the construction began, southbound traffic would back up where the car-pool lane ends and traffic merges from three lanes to two during the commute hour.</p><p>“As soon as the car-pool lane ends there is the congestion, but you get past that and it is smooth sailing to Petaluma,” said Jim Flessner, a Sonoma County Water Agency engineer who works in Windsor and lives in Oakland.</p><p>Flessner is leery of what is in store once the Rohnert Park project really gets moving.</p><p>“It is slow now. It can end up being stop-and-go for awhile,” Flessner said. “I generally leave between 5 and 5:30 p.m., but if I can work until 6 or 6:30, I can breeze through.”</p><p>The Wilfred Avenue project was jeopardized by the state budget crisis. But the Metropolitan Transportation Commission used Toll Bridge Authority funds to purchase general obligation bonds to fund it.</p><p>A ground-breaking ceremony is Monday.</p><p>Following that work, the next project in line is adding car-pool lanes on Highway 101 from the Rohnert Park Expressway to Pepper Road in Petaluma. Bids will be opened on that project June 25.</p><p>The project is estimated to cost $118 million, but bids could come in under the estimate, which has occurred on other jobs that have been bid recently, said Suzanne Smith, the county transportation authority’s executive director.</p><p>Smith said the project has been approved and funds allocated by the state, but it could be delayed by the state’s budget crisis.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob.norberg@pressdemocrat.com.</p>