San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
TRAFFIC JAM
IT’S INEVITABLE: ONCE THE POWDER FALLS, SKIERS SWARM OVER LAKE TAHOE’S ROADS.
Every winter, the onslaught begins again. It’s predictable, reliable and irritating. When a powder day aligns with a weekend or a holiday, Tahoe’s rural network of two-lane highways becomes as tightly packed as Sierra cement with a string of Teslas, Tacomas, Subarus and Priuses rolling slowly along with the clickclack of chains. It starts soon as the National Weather Service issues a winter storm warning. The news triggers a predictable deluge of blog posts, tweets and push notifications that inflate the forecasted 6 inches of snow into an epic, FOMO-inducing powder day. A city’s worth of weekend warriors, season-pass holders and entire families starts preparing for mass migration, loading up their cars with the same idea: Let’s beat the traffic.
Sadly, dear skier, there’s no escaping it.
The traffic stems, predictably, from the region’s dozen ski resorts. Even for locals driving around the lake, ski-season traffic is a way of life. It’s something they begrudgingly accept as a tradeoff for the economic boost that comes with the hordes of tourists. If they want to avoid the traffic, they ski midweek or get up at ungodly, before-dawn hours to get a head start. I recall a day last March, after several feet of snow fell over four days, when the 11-mile drive from Truckee to Squaw Valley — a drive that usually takes 15 minutes — devolved into a two-hour nightmare along Highway 89. I blamed myself, the traffic, the tourists, the ski resorts, the government agencies.
For the love of skiing, I thought, why hasn’t anyone figured out how to solve the ski traffic problem in Tahoe?
Ski traffic on Highway 89 is at least 58 years old, going back as far as the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley. There were so many cars lining up to get into the valley then that Alex Cushing, the founder of Squaw Valley Ski Resort, set up an impromptu overflow parking lot with sawdust in the meadow, despite protests from the locals who lived in the valley.
Since then, just about everyone has taken a swing at finding a traffic solution: government agencies at the state, county and local levels; nonprofits; school districts; business owners; residents.
And yet traffic continues to crawl, fraying the nerves of skiers within hundreds of miles of Lake Tahoe.
The reason traffic in and around Tahoe is so bad is simple: The lake and its snowy basin are within driving range of the Bay Area, Sacramento and Reno, and everyone tends to come up at the same time — during snowstorms.
“We’re an extension of those urban areas,” says Carl Hasty, the manager of the Tahoe Transportation District, which was formed by California and Nevada in 1980 to do transportation projects in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Hasty estimates that 10 million visitor cars drive to Tahoe every year.
Those visitors drive on narrow mountain roads designed more than a century ago.
The Lincoln Highway, dedicated in 1913 and one of the first transcontinental roads in the U.S., splits in Sacramento to accommodate two routes that run north and south of Lake Tahoe before joining again in Nevada. U.S. Route 50 heads to South Lake Tahoe, and Interstate 80 goes to Truckee.
Within the Tahoe Basin, roads like State Highway 89 weave through tall trees and narrow banks, hugging the shoreline. At one spot, in Emerald Bay, steep slopes drop off either side of the road before it snakes in tight hairpin turns down to South Lake Tahoe. For this reason, the road around Emerald Bay is almost always closed when it snows; plowing is a slick job in terrain like this. Why not simply expand those highways to accommodate the traffic needs, you may wonder?
The idea has been considered, but it goes against town policy in Truckee, says Dan Wilkins, the director of the town’s Public Works Department. “There’s a concern that if you make the roads too wide, it changes the character of the community.”
Wilkins adds that it’s hard to justify the cost of a road expansion when ski traffic hits its peak on only a dozen or so days a year. “The other 350 days of the year, the two-lane roadways work just fine,” Wilkins says.
Officials also say roadway expansion is too costly and environmentally challenging. For instance, a 2008 proposal to expand the Mouse Hole — the tunnel where Highway 89 passes beneath the railroad tracks in Truckee — to four lanes was estimated to cost $47 million, according to Steven Nelson, spokesman for Cal-
“There’s a concern that if you make the roads too wide, it changes the character of the community.” Dan Wilkins, Truckee Public Works Department
trans District 3. “You’re almost cutting through the mountainside,” Nelson says. The cost was prohibitive, and the project was downsized to a $13 million “minimouse hole” for pedestrians and bicyclists to pass safely under the train tracks, next to the road’s separate tunnel.
Adding to the complications, the Truckee-Tahoe region is regulated by two states, six counties and several municipalities. No single agency has the jurisdiction or the budget to govern transportation. Everything that has been done to construct roads and build alternative modes of transportation — like extra shuttles to supplement the public bus during events, at night and for ski resorts — was the result of complex alliances and creative funding partnerships. For instance, a new bike path on the east shore of Lake Tahoe required buy-in from 13 agencies, Hasty says.
So you can imagine how difficult it is to establish a cohesive public transportation system.
Many other ski towns with traffic issues — Mammoth, Park City, Jackson Hole — fund free buses to shuttle skiers to and from resorts. Around Tahoe, public transportation is notoriously underfunded and underserviced. In North Lake Tahoe, the Tahoe Area Regional Transit service (TART) — whose buses connect the top of Donner Summit to Tahoe’s West and East Shores and cross two states and three counties — runs every hour. Attempts to increase bus service to every 30 minutes across the region have been thwarted by staffing challenges. (TART’s most popular local bus line, between Crystal Bay and Tahoe City, runs every 30 minutes.)
“We’re really a rural area, so we don’t have a lot of federal and state funding due to our population levels,” says Jamie Wright, the executive director of the Truckee North Tahoe Transportation Management Association, which manages TART’s operations. “It really does take a lot of publicprivate partnerships to make these things work in our region.”
Now add winter’s mix of ice and snow to the mindnumbing cocktail of publicprivate partnerships, jurisdictional complications and funding woes.
Interstate 80, the main artery from the Bay Area to Truckee and North Lake Tahoe, which runs over Donner Pass, receives more than 400 inches of snow per year on average. To keep the pass clear, Caltrans hires 650 people (including 250 seasonal employees) and reserves 130 pieces of snow removal and ice control equipment — snow blowers, graders, salt trucks — to work the 70 miles of road between Colfax and the Nevada state line. Last winter, Caltrans implemented chain control over Donner Pass on 54 days.
“The biggest challenge for us is folks from the Bay Area and Sacramento coming up not prepared for winter,” Nelson says. The best thing Bay Area skiers can do to keep traffic snarls to a minimum, he says, is check the weather ahead of time, travel in cars with four-wheel drive and make sure they have a full tank of gas before hitting the pass.
Caltrans is wrapping up a decade-plus $550 million construction project that rebuilt the highway system around Lake Tahoe. The new roads do a lot to filter storm water and improve the clarity of Lake Tahoe. They do not, however, alleviate traffic.
“Honestly, a through-lane on Highway 89 has been talked about for the last 25 years,” Wright says. “There are a lot of challenges when we look at snow removal, space in certain areas, how it is going to be managed, where the safety zone would be for CHP or anyone who has to pull over on the side of the road.”
In 1990, the Transportation Management Association was formed to pool funding and develop partnerships that would boost public transportation in the Truckee-Tahoe region. There have been wins — like a new bus route that connects Kings Beach and Truckee year round. It has also run into challenges: More than once, a measure on the ballot that would fund public transportation has failed.
“Is (traffic) compounded 10 times worse now? I would say yes, because you have so many more people driving in on a day-visitation basis,” Wright says. “Twenty years ago, we really didn’t have that.”
There have been some encouraging developments recently.
This winter, the TMA is
launching a free park-andride bus service from Truckee to Northstar and Squaw Valley ski resorts, running every 30 minutes during weekend mornings and afternoons. The idea is to encourage drivers on Interstate 80 to park in Truckee and catch a bus. To get funding, TMA is coordinating with ski resorts and Placer County and working with the school district and the airport district to access 150 to 200 parking spaces.
Drivers pulling up to Squaw Valley will notice that the resort has blocked off a huge section of its 5,000-car parking lot for carpooling. Since 2016, Squaw has reserved some of its parking spaces for carpooling — or POW Parking, named after Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit founded by Truckee snowboarder Jeremy Jones to raise awareness about climate change. This year, the resort quadrupled the number of spaces to a total of 800.
“It’s really a very simple goal of reducing our carbon footprint and reducing traffic,” says Liesl Hepburn, spokeswoman for Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows.
To park in one of the POW spots, drivers need to have at least three people in their car or to pay a $30 fee. Locals who are used to pulling up to the front of the lot are grumbling, especially because that money is not being donated to Protect Our Winters. Instead, the money is earmarked to pay full-time attendants to regulate the lot.
“We know that traffic is a problem. It’s frustrating for our guests, and it’s frustrating for us,” Hepburn says.
Will piecemeal initiatives like carpool lots and parkand-ride bus services actually ease gridlock around Tahoe?
Every little bit counts, Hasty says. But the real solution is region-wide public transit, funded in part by Tahoe’s millions of annual visitors. “We need them for our economy and our lifeblood,” Hasty says. “But they’re also the resource to help put the transit system and those mechanisms in place to make it work.”
Hasty is already laying the groundwork for a regional public transit plan, which could include a ferry to shuttle passengers across Lake Tahoe, transit hubs for visitors to park and leave their cars for the weekend, and perhaps additional train-tobus trips connecting the Bay Area, Auburn and Truckee.
In the meantime, locals are hoping that visitors start riding the bus or piling into the back of a friend’s car. Still, as soon as you pull onto the two-lane road leading to your favorite ski area, prepare to hit your brakes.
Julie Brown is a freelance writer in the Lake Tahoe area. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com