San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
North Lake Tahoe’s traffic mess frustrates skiers, residents
Getting to North Lake Tahoe’s most popular ski resorts — Palisades Tahoe and Northstar California — on a winter weekend, particularly a holiday weekend, can require patience and endurance.
Even after drivers get across Donner Summit on I-80 with its chain controls, slippery conditions and periodic closures for whiteout conditions, the travel travails continue. Resortbound traffic into Truckee can get so heavy that it backs up onto Interstate 80, worrying the California Highway Patrol, and along highways 89 and 267, which lead to the ski resorts.
The trip from I-80 to Palisades or Northstar can take two to four hours.
The problem doesn’t affect only skiers. Residents complain that gridlock makes it difficult for them to get to weekend jobs or the supermarket or to catch a flight in Reno or Sacramento. A county supervisor worries about the effect on emergency services, including getting an injured skier to the hospital.
“Even if they can get an ambulance to the ski area, they have to wait an hour and a half to get to Tahoe City before they can head back for their next call,” Placer County Supervisor Cindy Gustafson said.
The problem, she said, is complicated as the region attempts to deal with rapid changes in how people live, work and play in the resort region.
Any solutions could be costly and controversial — a $100 million transit-only lane added to the middle of highways 89 and 267, reservation requirements for parking or even skiing, or more ski trains from the Bay Area and Reno to Truckee, where skiers could catch shuttles to lodging and resorts. Even a monorail zipping down Highway 89 has been suggested.
Despite its alpine beauty and abundant recreation, living in North Lake Tahoe, particularly near the resorts, can have its downsides.
Michael Carabetta, a board member of Save Olympic Valley, lives on Olympic Valley Road, the main thoroughfare leading to the resort. During the winter, he told The Chronicle, he and his family do their grocery shopping on weekdays and plan to stay at home.
“We basically are locked in our house for the day,” he said. “The road is backed up nonstop all the way to the Mousehole (a traffic-constricting railroad undercrossing) in Truckee.
“We literally cannot leave our home.”
Many area residents work weekends, some in Sacramento or Reno, Gustafson said, and their commutes can be lengthy and hard to predict. It’s not unusual for visitors or even locals to miss flights out of Reno or Sacramento because of traffic congestion.
“Especially getting out of the Lake Tahoe Basin or the valleys is problematic,” Gustafson said.
Backed-up traffic has been a problem at Tahoe for decades, but it’s growing worse, authorities and residents say, due to a confluence of changes including the surge in remote workers during the pandemic and the growing popularity of ski passes that draw more skiers and at different times of the day. There’s also a reported 50 percent decrease in the number of passengers in cars heading into resort parking lots, according to a regional transportation study.
“We’ve got to come up with solutions to get people out of their cars,” Gustafson said, citing the study. “Locally we haven’t had the political will to do projects to get people out their cars.”
Of course, there’s also this season’s deep and frequent snowfall, which has drawn huge crowds to the resorts after three years of pandemic, drought and less-than-ideal ski seasons.
Placer County, Caltrans, the ski resorts and Truckee have thrown millions of dollars at the gridlock but haven’t been able to make much of a dent.
That was evident at a recent meeting of community advisory councils in Tahoe City where scores of people crowded into a rented meeting hall where they discussed the challenges of winter traffic. Gustafson started the meeting by asking for a show of hands from people who were angry about the traffic problem. Nearly everyone in the room raised theirs.
“We’re all frustrated,” said Steve Teshara, a founding member of the Truckee North Tahoe Transportation Management Association.
Most of the efforts in recent years have focused on transit — adding buses to serve resort areas and business districts as well as micro-transit, smaller shuttles that take people directly between their homes and their destinations. Caltrans and the ski resorts have added electronic signs to advise skiers when parking lots are full.
But most skiers, many already hours into their drive to Tahoe, ignore the warnings and head to the resorts, waiting in their cars for someone to leave or parking in private lots or on neighborhood streets where parking is often banned.
Palisades and Northstar have so far resisted the notion of requiring reservations for parking — or to get on a lift — but representatives at the meeting said they could conceivably take that step.
“It’s on the table — every year,” said Amy Ohran, Northstar general manager, referring to parking reservations.
The big plan, however, is for lanes devoted to public transit and private buses — a new third lane, likely in the middle of highways 89 and 267 and perhaps beyond. The lanes, which would be reversible depending on the direction of ski traffic, would be so pricey that they would likely have to be built in stages.
Meanwhile, Placer County continues to double down on transit, investing $4.3 million a year in buses and shuttles in the TruckeeNorth Tahoe area. It’s seen some success, authorities said, but has been slowed by the national shortage of bus drivers.
Technology also plays a role, with resorts and government agencies blasting out alerts about traffic and full parking lots via text messages, apps and even old-fashioned radio — important because cell- phone reception is weak along Highway 89.
One thing that’s not being considered: new roads or wider roads for private cars.
“We’ve heard for 20 years that people are just not interested in widening our roads,” said Ken Grehm, Placer County’s public works director. “We’re not looking at that.”