Pandemic may be saving us from ‘carmageddon’
With roads, trains nearly empty, crews speeding up projects during shutdown
Even by the fearsome standards of Highway 101 traffic, this summer was shaping up to be especially miserable.
Crews were set to replace a section of the congested freeway through its hulking interchange with Interstate 280 in San Francisco in July, shutting down the northbound lanes, forcing about 240,000 daily commuters onto detours and backing up traffic for miles down the Peninsula.
But with rush-hour congestion practically nonexistent these days and car traffic down as much as 60% on that stretch of highway, Caltrans officials moved the replacement project up to this month in a bid to spare thousands of drivers from a project that had been dubbed the Bay Area’s “carmageddon.”
They’re not alone in trying to wring something positive from the coronavirus crisis and shelter orders that have upended millions of lives — and kept commuters off roads, trains and buses.
BART maintenance teams have ramped up their work installing new power cables through San Francisco, replacing aging sections of track and upgrading stations in El Cerrito, Oakland and Union City.
“We’re taking advantage of every minute we can get,” said Tamar Allen, BART’s chief maintenance and engineering officer.
Along with the Highway 101 project in San Francisco, road crews are working longer hours to build express lanes on Interstates 680 and 880 in the East Bay, improve the interchange of 680 and Highway 4, and repave all but deserted downtown Oakland arteries to prep them for the arrival of AC Transit’s long anticipated bus lanes.
On the Peninsula, Caltrain has stepped up work on its electrification project now that trains are running on reduced schedules.
Shelter-in-place orders have halted many construction projects, but work on the region’s essential transportation infrastructure has mostly continued — with some changes meant to keep crews safe.
Allen said BART now sends crews out with 55-gallon drums of water and soap so they can regularly wash their hands, and it dispatches more vehicles to ferry workers to and from job sites to allow for social distancing during the trip. Huddles at the start of shifts are out, with workers standing farther apart for their briefings.
And once the job starts, Allen said, “We’re doing what we can to spread the workers out.”
Not everything is speeding up during the shelter order. Social distancing proved impossible on a key maintenance project in the Transbay Tube, which requires more than 100 workers in the tunnel beneath the bay, so the project has been put on hold. Crews on other projects are equipped with N95 masks if their work requires them to be close together, Allen said.
A spokesman for AC Transit said the need to follow social distancing guidelines is slowing progress on work to finish the dedicated lanes and distinctive new stops of the East Bay’s first bus rapid transit line, which will run from downtown Oakland to the San Leandro
BART station along International Boulevard.
And problems could mount as the coronavirus crisis drags on — workers could get sick or be forced to isolate because they’ve been exposed to the illness, and agencies might not be able to get the materials they need for projects if global supply chains falter.
But in many cases, lighter traffic and ridership are freeing up more time for crews to work and providing better opportunities to knock out projects like the Highway 101 work in San Francisco that would otherwise cause major headaches.
“Caltrans will be able to complete this vital infrastructure project with less delay for drivers and minimize the need for local street traffic detours,” Tony Tavares, Caltrans’ Bay Area director, said in a statement. Prep for the project began last week, and work is set to begin in earnest Saturday; it’s supposed to take about two weeks.
First, crews will detour all northbound traffic — which in normal circumstances would include everyone from Peninsula residents commuting to jobs in the city to tourists coming from SFO — off Highway 101 and onto Interstate 280, so they can demolish and rebuild an 800-foot stretch of the three-lane freeway. Southbound traffic won’t be affected at first, but once the northbound side is done, those new lanes will become a detour for southbound drivers so crews can replace the other side of the freeway.
Of course, maintenance crews won’t be able to complete every disruptive project while we sit inside.
BART’s multiyear project replacing power cables in San Francisco, for instance, will almost certainly continue long after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, to the exasperation of Sunday BART riders whose trips get delayed as trains single-track through much of the city on days when that work is being done.
But with daily BART ridership down more than 90% and schedules slashed — trains now run every 30 minutes, and service stops three hours earlier than normal — crews have bigger windows of time to work on that project and others, Allen said.
For every week BART can work on the cable project during the shelter-inplace order, she said, it will shave a month off the overall timeline for the project.
“We’re going to be able to finish this project way ahead of what we thought we were going to do,” Allen said.