101 Freeway in California Slower Than Ever After Widening, Locals Say

A two-phase project to add capacity to Highway 101 where it crosses the San Francisco Peninsula spent $600 million and so far has accomplished no progress on congestion, according to a recent article by Roger Ruddick for Streetsblog San Francisco.

The first phase of the project opened in February 2022, with the second phase opening in March 2023. According to locals, however, congestion on the stretch of highway between San Bruno and Palo Alto is unchanged, however.

Rudick quotes Mike Swire, a Peninsula advocate and member of the Citizen’s Advisory Committee of the San Mateo County Transit Authority, who describes the congestion on Highway 101 as only getting worse. "At what point do we stop doing something we know isn't working?" asks Swire in the article.

The project spent $600 million to add Express Lanes along the 15-mile stretch, one of two direct freeway connections between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. The article characterizes the widening of little to no avail as a repetition of a theme in California.

“This is a continually repeating pattern with freeway widening projects: think of the Oakland Alameda Access Project, a project to massively increase the size of a ramp complex in South San Francisco, or the widening of Los Angeles's 405 freeway, or many other freeway widening and road capacity projects,” writes Rudick of the ability of induced demand to overwhelm all automobile infrastructure capacity in the Bay Area.

It must be noted that no data to back up the figures about congestion on Highway 101 are included.