California Highway Headlines for June 2017

Turn up the heat — summer has begun in Southern California. Brush fires are in full force, smoke is in the air, the freeways are packed, and it’s hot. What better than some highway headlines…

• Car talk: Caltrans Collects Comments to Improve a High Desert Highway. Highway 395 runs along California’s eastern side—a backbone highway figuratively—and a lonely one, too. Not as lonely as Nevada’s Highway 50—the so-called “Loneliest Road in America,” but Highway 395 travels a route through country that is high desert and scrub, shuttered towns and isolated cattle ranches with those sweeping, circular wheel lines that water the heck out of alfalfa fields.
• San Francisco-sized population at Tahoe? Bridge could have changed lake forever. Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay is perhaps the most spectacular nook in one of the world’s beautiful alpine basins. But it can be an elusive nook. This winter, avalanches closed the highway above the bay for weeks, severing the loop road around the lake. What if the highway didn’t have to make that tightrope walk across the steep mountainside behind the bay? What if it simply ran straight and low along the lakeshore instead, like it does elsewhere in the basin? Of course, that would mean a bridge across the mouth of Emerald Bay.
• Is Big Sur’s Highway 1 worth saving?. Ever since a thin ledge of pavement was poured along Big Sur’s cliffs, opening the rugged region to tourism in the 1920s and 1930s, California has fiercely fought to save Highway 1. And Mother Nature just shrugs it off. More than 60 times in its history, the Big Sur route has been buried by landslides. Even before this winter’s storms, about $130 million was budgeted over the next decade for repair, replacement and realignment.

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