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Hell on Wheels No More
Sweet Sally Jesus, it's twue! it's twue! Devil's Slide is once again open to through traffic. And they said it couldn't be done.
By 4:30 a.m. when we rolled the SFist news Bronco up to the Montara entrance of the slide hoping to be one of the first to pass through the reopened roadway, all the gates were down and the road crews already gone. Only two CHPs, a KRON car, and a photographer from the Half Moon Bay Review gave evidence to the fact that this morning was special. (In fact, Caltrans opened the Slide to the public last night at about 10:00 p.m. Let-down.) All the glam and glitz happened yesterday, in a secret ceremony, for the priveleged, behind barricades, far away from the unwashed masses. They probably needed the extra elbow room for all that back patting they were doing.
Heading out of Montara, the road was freshly paved and striped, and rode much better than before the closure. Passing through the area of most damage, where the buckled pavement had dropped about three feet, we couldn't even notice the scars. In fact, the troublesome tarmac, lonely and dark with a heavy glaze of mist, looked like it had never been closed, never been the source of so much anguish and frustration for Coastsiders.
It's twue.
As we came steaming down the last grade into Pacifica, we were literally blinded by the white-hot, nuquelar-grade lights of a TV van. In fact, on the Pacifica side of the Slide, there were about four or five TV vans and several other cars parked along the side of the road. No partying though. Again, a bit of a disappointment. We hoped to see lines of students and Devil's Slide buffs (or at least some Goths and Satanists) lined up in their sleeping bags and tents waiting to rush the roadway for a contractor's autograph or a chunk of asphalt.
The reopening should help relieve the massive traffic congestion that has plagued the Coastside since Caltrans shut the Slide down on April 3, but Coastsiders and visitors expecting traffic free-flow might not want to abandon their Rideshare Tuesdays just yet.
You know we been to the Edge of the Known World, and stood and looked down, you know we lost a lot of friends there baby, got no time to mess around.
Traffic has always been bad on the coast, with or without the Slide, especially during rush hour and weekends. During the latest Devil's Slide crisis, Coastsiders have adjusted quite well with carpools, flexible scheduling, and alternative forms and routes of transportation. In April and May, traffic was stacked for miles, and it could take more than hour to drive the five miles from El Granada to Highway 92 in Half Moon Bay. But in the last month or two, the morning drive time has dropped back down to preclosure levels. Part of that is the fact that school is out, which always reduces Coastside rush hour congestion, but part of it is due to the adaptive measures taken.
The concern is that now that the Slide is open, everybody will abandon their adaptive measures and go back to one person-one car, you know, the American way of life.
Proponents of the tunnel currently being built to replace Devil's Slide point to this year's closure as a confirmation of their pet project, but critics of the project wonder why $300 million is being spent to upgrade 1.5 miles of a secondary route into the coastside, when the primary access road into the coast, Highway 92, is woefully inadequate for the amount of daily traffic under the best of conditions.
If it took politicians and voters 40 years to agree on upgrading a tiny portion of the secondary route, how many centuries will it take to get Highway 92 to the point where it can handle its load? Patch, patch, patch.