The City of Sacramento is soliciting comments on its Interstate 5 / Richards Boulevard Interchange Project. Please take a look and comment.

My comments are summarized as:

• The safety justification doesn’t hold water. The interchange itself has no fatal collisions and no severe injuries during the period of time analyzed (safety starts at about 9:56 in the video). The severe injury collisions are all outside the project area. The city is definitely trying to gaslight people on the safety issue. If the city were actually concerned about safety, they would be doing projects at the severe injury locations. But they are not. In fact, unnecessary projects like this one gobble up the funds that could be used to solve real safety issues. It is worth pointing out that this area is not a high priority in the city’s Vision Zero program. There are many, many areas in the city with far higher collision rates.
• The information on bicycle and pedestrian improvements is very fuzzy. Nothing is indicated that to me makes is seem safer for either. More traffic means less safety, unless the safety improvements are substantial, and I just do not see that here. See DDI comment below.
• The project points out rightly there there will be increased demand for travel as a result of residential, commercial, and public development in the Railyards and River District areas. But it makes no mention of other ways of solving the issue. Demand management? Never heard of it. The project simply accepts that traffic congestion will get worse if no infrastructure is built, so infrastructure must be built. Of course the EIR has to consider the no-build alternative to be legal, but the city is certainly not presenting that option to the public.
• The project uses traffic delay through the interchange (on the interstate) to justify the project. The current traffic delay is due to the fact that commuter traffic has been encouraged by the provision of additional capacity on Interstate 5 to the south of the city, and on Interstate 80 east and west of the city. Of course things will get worse at this location, as more people commute and travel on this increased capacity. This is called induced travel, and is to be expected. Induced travel is increased by capacity expansion projects.
• The city wants to spend $46 to $100 million of your tax money to ‘solve’ this problem. If we let them do that, they will be back in a few years with another project to ‘solve’ the problem at some other nearby pinch point, and the new project will be even more expensive because they have induced more travel by ‘solving’ the perceived congestion problem here.

It is time for us to demand that highways engineers be cut off from building new capacity. They see the taxpayer pockets as their piggy bank. Fix what we have, and invest the remaining transportation funds in supporting walking, bicycling, and transit.

The projects proposes making the interchange into a diverging diamond interchange (DDI), where the travel lanes switch sides under the freeway so as to reduce the number of intersections, and to ease common vehicle movements. Some people hate DDIs. Traffic and highway engineers love them. I’m pretty indifferent. I have spent a lot of time observing DDIs, before and after. They do offer some improvement in traffic flow, and they do offer minor improvement in safety for drivers. They are not any better or worse for bicyclist and pedestrian comfort and safety, IF they are designed properly (I’ve seen some very poor installations, some of which won awards from AASHTO, the highway lobby entity, that never saw an expensive project it did not love). It does take a period of a year or two for people to adjust to the different feeling of a DDI, but that is not necessarily bad. So my opposition to this project is not due to the DDI, but other issues. Others may feel differently.