Progress on proposed Highway 68 improvements

Another step towards big improvements to Highway 68 tonight. Transportation officials hosted a workshop to educate and get feedback from the community on potential changes.

The Transportation Agency of Monterey County, TAMC, has three different options in mind to improve safety on the highway. They talked about them at Thursday night’s meeting and found the community can’t seem to agree on one solution.

“They need to do something about it. Widen the roads put a bypass in but it just can’t continue the way it’s going” said Monterey County resident Greg Chilton. “The way it’s going it’s making commerce and life just entirely too difficult out here.”

A familiar complaint about the busy highway that TAMC has seen with its own data.

That’s why they’ve been working on a number of possible solutions.

“The main goal is to improve the highway for safety for congestion and the environment” said TAMC transportation planner Grant Leonard.

Right now they have three plans that include roundabouts instead of signals, widening three parts of the road, or an adaptive signal system that would improve traffic flow.

Thanks to Measure X they have some money to make it happen.

“Measure X is really key here because it includes 50 million dollars over the next 30 years and that’s money that’s dedicated to Highway 68” Leonard says. “It’s money that we can use to leverage more money from the state and federal government.”

TAMC says it still wants to hear from you about which plan would be best.

“Of course we need the community to buy in so we know we’ve got a good plan for everybody” Leonard said.

Though not everybody agrees on what that right plan is for the road.

“There’s still not a clear winner from this group of people and that’s why it’s really important that we keep doing our public outreach” Leonord said.

TAMC says it’ll have a final plan by August 23rd. You can give your input online at this link.