Free Republic

Imagine driving along a four-lane elevated causeway above the brackish San Pablo Bay, shaving more than an hour off the normal Highway 37 commute. Transportation planners have for years envisioned remaking the 20-mile route from Novato to Vallejo into the North Bay’s most important east-west corridor. Now, they are ready to act. Officials in Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties have been meeting for several years, pondering solutions to Highway 37’s notorious bottlenecks, where 45,000 cars per day stretch the normal 20-minute commute to as much as 100 minutes. They have also acknowledged that traffic improvements will be irrelevant without...

Highway 37 began life as a private toll road, and was later converted to a state highway. But climate change and sea-level rise will doom the road unless something is done. For the short term, the ridiculous two-lane section between Sears Point and Vallejo needs to be widened to match the rest of the road, which is four lanes. Wetlands surrounding the road also need to be restored. It would be reasonable to use some toll money for wetlands restoration, in part to mitigate the effects of construction. Even with the new funding approved by the Legislature by raising the...