Anyway. The government organization CalTrans supposedly does all sorts of planning and forecasting regarding improving which Bay Area freeway first, which have priority, and so on. One particular freeway, Interstate 880, gets quite dicey just south of the city of Milpitas, where the 3 lane freeway goes down to 2 lanes shortly after the Montague Expressway exit. This is an almost constant traffic bottleneck, slowing down because one lane disappears. And, this particular problem was one of the earlier traffic snafus to arise from the high tech boom.

One would then hope that beyond Montague, an extra lane would be added to accomodate the extra cars. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of extra space for an additional lane to be added, but... that's why THEY work for CalTrans and I don't. Yet no widening at that point will be occurring. In fact, the problem is going to be exacerbated. Just 2 exits north of this snarl is another nasty area, the intersection of 880 with highway 237, connecting the southeast bay with many tech companies. This whole onramp system is being entirely revamped - it would appear that a fly-over system is being created such that exiting cars will not take up additional space in the freeway system. Unfortunately in addition to this, another lane or two is being added to the freeway itself. So aside from 880 going from three lanes to two lanes at Montague, it will at some point less than 5 miles north go from 4 or 5 lanes down to three. Double bottleneck! That will be a terrific headache to get through, that's for sure. I'm really glad that's not part of my commute route.

And so, CalTrans wins a Planning Myopia award. In my eyes, they don't know what's going to hit them. And if they do, they sure aren't planning for it all that well.