Caltrans Highway 1 project report sparks lawsuit

SANTA CRUZ — A major, multimodal transit project in Aptos has been challenged in Sacramento Superior Court after a pair of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the effort this week.

The Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, an unincorporated group of individuals and organizations focused on opposition to highway expansion projects in the county, and the Sierra Club filed the lawsuit March 18 against Caltrans with the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission, the local lead for the project, listed as a party of interest.

Central to the project are plans to establish a combination of auxiliary lanes and bus-on-shoulder facilities along Highway 1 from State Park Drive to Freedom Boulevard along with the development of Coastal Rail Trail Segment 12, including various bicycle and pedestrian bridge improvements.

The lawsuit argues that the highway developments in particular will cause “severe and irreparable impacts to the environment” by actually increasing vehicle miles traveled and that Caltrans’ environmental impact report for the project evades requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act.

“This project is based on the discredited belief that auxiliary lanes will reduce congestion,” said Rick Longinotti, chair of the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, in a release. “What we need are alternatives to being stuck in traffic. Spending $180 million on a futile project diverts funds from those alternatives.”

According to the release, the environmental act requires measurement of vehicle miles traveled along with mitigation efforts, but the groups wrote that Caltrans wrongfully claims an exemption from such requirements. The groups also allege environmental act violations stemming from a lack of adequately exploring alternatives to the project.

The auxiliary lanes, such as the one leading to Soquel Drive in the southbound direction, will be open to all vehicles while the bus-on-shoulder facilities placed in between the exit ramps will be exclusive to public transit buses. Longinotti contends that the expanded auxiliary lanes will simply fill up and create more congestion through a process known as “induced travel,” and that even the impact report itself estimated traffic reductions to be short-lived. He wrote that cities such as Minneapolis, Cleveland and Atlanta have genuine bus-on-shoulder operations that would be more effective if implemented along the entire length of the freeway instead of in truncated segments.

Conversely, project proponents argue that the collective power of the multimodal benefits will help create efficiency and give people multiple travel options. The package of improvements, planners say, will speed up travel time for buses, reduce cut-through traffic on local streets, improve bicycle and pedestrian safety and increase connectivity from Watsonville to Santa Cruz.

“The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission is committed to this project and will continue to move forward to deliver these critical transportation improvements for the community,” wrote Regional Transportation Commission spokesperson Shannon Munz in a statement to the Sentinel.

Caltrans declined to comment on the pending litigation.

The State Park Drive to Freedom Boulevard segment is part of a larger, three-phase project from the commission known as the Watsonville-Santa Cruz Multimodal Corridor Program. Each phase includes similar auxiliary lane and bus-on-shoulder designs and multimodal enhancements which, altogether, stretch from Soquel Drive to Freedom Boulevard. The first phase, ranging from Soquel Drive to 41st Avenue, broke ground last April and was expected to be complete in 2025, while the second phase from the Bay/Porter exit to State Park Drive is just ramping up construction that is forecast to be finished sometime in 2026. Construction for the third and final phase was estimated last week by project officials to begin sometime in 2026.

Munz wrote that staff doesn’t yet know if the lawsuit will impact construction timelines.

“As the third and final phase of the larger Highway 1 Auxiliary Lane and Bus-on-Shoulder (41st Avenue to Freedom Boulevard) project, we are confident that this project will have a tremendous benefit to the community, transforming regional travel and providing multiple innovative transportation options for the workers, students, seniors, low-income and minority populations, families, and visitors to our county,” Munz continued in the statement.

This latest litigation marks at least the third time the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation has sued Caltrans because of its impact reports, according to previous Sentinel reporting. One lawsuit dates back to 2009 — when the group was called the Campaign for Sensible Transportation — with regard to the Soquel/Morrissey Auxiliary Lane project and another from 2021 for a different segment of this same project, which the Sierra Club was a party to.

In 2022, the court ruled partially in favor of the advocacy group’s impact report challenge and ordered Caltrans to recirculate and revise its “Tier I” analysis in the report for high occupancy vehicle lanes along Highway 1. At the time, the transportation commission said the court “rejected the majority of the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation’s claims” in the lawsuit, clarifying that the Tier I analysis was programmatic-level while the project-level Tier II analysis, such as auxiliary lane creation and a bicycle and pedestrian bridge at Chanticleer Avenue, was allowed to continue.

The complete filing is at saccourt.ca.gov, case number: 24WM000051.