California needs a new plan to protect Highway 1

By Stafford Nichols, especially for CalMatters

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Highway 1 has been a global symbol of California’s golden lifestyle for generations. But we can no longer take its survival for granted.

A series of landslides that began in January 2023 buried the highway, isolating residents and disrupting the local economy for three years. Beacon Economics recently conducted an analysis which quantified the disruption, finding that a freeway closure cost the region an estimated $13.5 million each month it was impassable.

The highway recently reopened after being closed for about 36 months. Total economic damage due to lost business and tourism is estimated at nearly $500 million. This means approximately $30 million in lost tax revenue for local governments.

The California Department of Transportation deserves great recognition for their challenging and dangerous work to stabilize these slopes. However, it is inevitable that there will be more landslides. Tectonic uplift is constantly cracking mountains, etcincreasingly unstable atmospheric rivers saturation of unstable rock.

To protect the Central Coast economy, state and local policymakers must face this geological reality and move from reactive repairs to proactive measures. Strategies that can help secure the future of this iconic road include slope hardening engineering – and robots on standby.

We are currently repairing the road after a break. The state spent more than $160 million on emergency repairs for the three recent rinks alone.

Politicians must authorize and fund a campaign for pre-emptive hardening. We need to identify high-risk slopes now and proactively use soil anchoring, rock shelters, and cable mesh attenuators, which are flexible, cable-based landslide arrest networks.

These projects require significant upfront investment, but prevention is much cheaper than the combined cost of emergency repairs and years of economic shutdown.

Beacon’s analysis shows that speed is important to the economic recovery as it offers greater security, allowing business owners to retain staff and giving tourists the confidence to book round trips.

But repairs were halted because human crews couldn’t safely work on the active slide, so Caltrans had to deploy remote-controlled bulldozers and excavators, which took time. Now that we know this is a likely scenario in the future, Caltrans maintenance contracts may require pre-qualified contractors to maintain a fleet of these autonomous and remotely operated units.

When the next slide happens—and geology guarantees it will—these ready-to-help robots can be deployed to immediately begin clearing debris.

Sustainable infrastructure also requires sustainable financing. We need to create special financing mechanisms funds road repairs.

First, local authorities should investigate Areas with improved infrastructure financing. Although typically used for urban development, these neighborhoods can be a useful tool for the coast.

Districts will not raise taxes for residents. Instead, they would capture future growth in property tax revenue generated by high-value real estate turnover and the tourism economy to underwrite infrastructure bonds. This ensures that the wealth generated by the Big Sur Coast is reinvested directly into the pathway that makes that wealth possible.

Second, while a traditional toll on an existing highway is legally difficult due to right-of-way issues, we may be able to achieve similar results by implementing a virtual parking reservation system at high-traffic vistas like the Bixby Bridge. Like the Muir Woods system already in place, travelers will pay for a parking space ahead of time online, raising funds to harden the road while discouraging the dangerous roadside congestion that currently clogs the highway.

This would ensure that those who use the coast’s resources help pay for their protection.

Work remains to refine these ideas, but it is certain that the geologic hazards to Highway 1 will continue. City and county governments have lost $10 million in tax revenue annually since the last closure. Spending some of that on preventative solutions to keep the road open would be a net positive.

If we are not proactive in protecting this famous route, we will find ourselves traveling down a dangerous road.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.