Headlines About California Highways – February 2025

Twenty-Eight Days. February may be a short month, but it sure seems long. I truly miss the days when I didn’t have to ask every day (or more frequently, it seems) what crap is coming out of Washington DC now. Hard to believe that was less than two months ago. Prices are up, Stocks are down. Good people, including many I know, have lost jobs. NSF and research funding impacts threaten ACSAC. All of this on top of the fires of January, and 2025 has been a very stressful year.

There is a little good news. I plan to put in retirement papers to my employer next week, with a target date on July 1. My daughter has accepted a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis—my mother’s alma mater. I think she would be proud. The postdoc starts in August; until then, she’s teaching at both Ripon College and UW Madison. The theatre schedule is heating up, meaning at least I have distractions over the weekend.

In terms of other activities: I’ve been a long-time judge at the California Science and Engineering Fair (and also here). I’m now part of the Judges Advisory Committee, and we’re gearing up for an in-person fair on April 13 (alas, the first day of Pesach). WE NEED SCIENCE FAIR JUDGES. If you work in STEM field, and can be in Southern California the weekend of April 13, please sign up to be a judge (I might even be able to provide a seder Saturday night and a guest room). Information on 2025 CSEF Judging is here; please sign up for the alert list. I will likely be the panel chair for the J-MA—Junior Mathematics—again.

The craziness of my schedule, combined with the craziness of Tom’s schedule, means that the podcast release schedule has slipped a bit. We’re scheduled to record episode 2.08 on Tuesday 3/4, after I teach a class on the RMF (NIST 800-37 Rev 2), but I likely won’t have time to edit the episode until sometime the following week, meaning a potential release date of 3/16 (over a month since the last episode). I apologize for the delay.

Retirement will allow me to spend more time on things I enjoy doing, such as working on the highway pages and the podcast. As a reminder: One of the sources for the highway page updates (and the raison d’etre for for this post) are headlines about California Highways that I’ve seen over the last month. I collect them in this post, which serves as fodder for the updates to my California Highways site, and so there are also other pages and things I’ve seen that I wanted to remember for the site updates. Lastly, the post also includes some things that I think would be of peripheral interest to my highway-obsessed highway-interested readers.

I only was able to release one episode of the podcast in February: the episode on the Westside Freeway. It looks like the regular audience is between 60-70 folks, and I’d love to get that number up. You can help. Please tell your friends about the podcast, “like”, “♥”, or “favorite” it, and give it a rating in your favorite podcatcher. For those that hear the early episodes, the sound quality of the episodes does get better — we were learning. If you know sound editing, feel free to give me advice (I use Audacity to edit). As always, you can keep up with the show at the podcast’s forever home at https://www.caroutebyroute.org , the show’s page on Spotify for Creators, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcatching app or via the RSS feeds (CARxR, Spotify for Creators) . The following episode has been posted this month:

• CA RxR 3.07: I-5: The Central Valley: Next up in our exploration of I-5: the segment between the I-5 / Route 99 split and where I-5 meets former US 99W (now Route 113) in Woodland. Generally known as the “Westside Highway”, this was mostly a completely new routing for I-5 along LRN 238, although some portions paralleled former US 50 between Stockton and Sacramento, and Sign Route 16 between Sacramento and near Route 113 in Woodland/Yolo.  As usual, we cover the history of the route, naming, and projects. Subsequent episodes will be looking at (3.08) the planned I-5W; (3.09) the former US 99W portion from Sacramento to Redding; and (3.09) the portion from Redding to the Oregon Border. (Spotify for Creators)

Well, you should now be up to date. Here are the headlines that I found about California’s highways for January.

Key

[Ħ Historical information | ＄ Paywalls, ＄＄ really obnoxious paywalls, and ∅ other annoying restrictions. I’m no longer going to list the paper names, as I’m including them in the headlines now. Note: For ＄ paywalls, sometimes the only way is incognito mode, grabbing the text before the paywall shows, and pasting into an editor. See this article for more tips on bypassing paywalls. ☊ indicates an primarily audio article. ↈ indicates a primarily video article. ]

Highway Headlines

• Granite inks $88M deal to pave, widen SoCal highway (Construction Dive). Granite Construction has inked an $88 million contract to improve a stretch of winding, mountainous highway in Southern California. The Watsonville, California-based contractor announced the award from the California DOT on Jan. 23 to make safety enhancements on State Route 74 near the city of Lake Elsinore.
• California Transportation Commission Allots $1 Billion for Highway System (Roads and Bridges). On Friday, the California Transportation Commission (CTC) allocated nearly $1 billion for projects aimed at solving mobility challenges and aiding California’s continued effort to make the highway system more resilient to climate change. […] Among the projects approved include $15 million for the installation of electric charging infrastructure to power electric buses at San Mateo County’s SamTrans system, $9.5 million to help pay for new bike lanes, crosswalks, pedestrian push buttons, signal heads and other safety upgrades on an 8-mile segment of SR-82 in Santa Clara County and $6 million for the city of Sacramento to help build a new light rail station serving Sacramento City College.
• City of Fresno wins lawsuit to rename 10-mile stretch of road (CBS 47). New street signs for a 10-mile stretch of road in Fresno were installed Tuesday after the city prevailed in a lawsuit brought on by the community. The city says Kings Canyon Road, Ventura Avenue, and California Avenue now bear the name Cesar Chavez Boulevard. City Hall says the change honors labor rights leader “Cesar Chavez’s enduring legacy” and “aligns with our community’s shared values of justice, equality, and community empowerment.”
• Dixon’s Parkway Boulevard overcrossing project aimed at improving public safety (Yahoo News/KXTL). As the city of Dixon continues to grow, new changes will soon be coming. A new overpass project is underway to connect the city’s east and west sides, which are divided by railroads. The city recently received a $25.2 million federal grant to aid in completing the project. The idea to connect one side of town to the other is over two decades old.
• Bay Area city council supports removing bike lanes, restoring parking (SF Gate). Building more bike lanes has become a major priority for communities across California, but one Bay Area community is going in the opposite direction, potentially spending over $600,000 to rip out recently built bike lanes. The San Mateo City Council unanimously agreed earlier this week to support the removal of controversial bike lanes on Humboldt Street, the longest bike lanes in the city. The immediate removal of the lanes is estimated to cost $620,000, but the entire plan could cost close to $2 million. The contentious meeting, which drew significant public comment, ran until 11 p.m.

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