PD Editorial: Finally, three lanes all the way on Highway 101

The decadeslong effort to expand Highway 101 marked an important milestone this week.

With a San Francisco judge's dismissal of a lawsuit challenging bridge tolls, funding is in place to open the last bottleneck between Windsor and the Golden Gate Bridge.

A third lane in each direction between Petaluma and the Sonoma County line already was set to open in 2022, and the final stretch - from the county line to Novato - can be now completed a year later.

There finally will be three lanes all the way from Windsor to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Some old-timers say exasperation with bumper-to-bumper traffic fueled calls to widen Highway 101 as far back as the early 1960s. We know for sure that serious discussions about widening the North Bay's main north-south thoroughfare were underway by the mid-1980s.

The hard part was raising $1.2 billion to pay for the expansion.

State and federal money usually is contingent on a local contribution. But between 1990 and 2000, voters in Sonoma County rejected three sales tax increases earmarked for highway widening and a fourth measure to fund commuter rail.

Finally, in 2004, voters approved Measure M, a half-cent sales tax increase that provided almost $200 million toward the local share of the Highway 101 widening project. (Two years later, voters in Sonoma and Marin counties approved a quarter-cent tax for the SMART rail system.)

By 2012, new carpool lanes were completed from Windsor to Petaluma.

But Measure M didn't include widening the highway through Petaluma or the Novato Narrows. It took seven more years to obtain that money.

The Sonoma County Transportation Authority cobbled together funds from various sources to pay for carpool lanes south of Petaluma. In March, the state allocated $85 million from a 2017 gas tax increase to pay for a third lane through Petaluma. Had voters repealed the gas tax increase in November, the money would have been withdrawn. Instead, construction will begin in August.

Which brings us to San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman, who rejected arguments from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association that bridge toll increases approved by a majority of Bay Area voters in 2018 are actually taxes that require supermajority approval.

The first of three $1 toll hikes over seven years went into effect Jan. 1, with revenue earmarked for numerous regional projects, including the Marin County segment of the Novato Narrows. But expenditures were held up by the litigation.

“It is true that all of these projects tend to cost too much and take too long,” Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt told Staff Writer Kevin Fixler. “But, hell, you've got to do them and make investments for the next generation, just like the previous one did for us.”

It has been a long haul, and there's still two years of work, with occasional traffic delays, to go. But one of the North Bay's most ambitious goals is on the verge of being attained.

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