Santa Cruz County celebrates opening of “Whale Bridge” Hwy 1 Overcrossing

Dozens of people in the Santa Cruz area came together Wednesday for a ceremony to celebrate the whale bridge, a newly opened crossing for pedestrians and cyclists over highway 1 in live oak.

"The Chanticleer Overcrossing offers a safer, more accessible route for people walking and biking across the highway, and the highway acts as a barrier between communities. But this bridge reconnects those communities," said Sarah Christensen, Executive Director of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission.

A bulk of the funding for this came from Measure D in 2016, when Santa Cruz County voters approved a half-cent sales tax, generating more than $4 million a year to fund transit projects for the next three decades.

“And it’s so great that’s why we’re continuing it throughout the county all the way down throughout Aptos to freedom boulevard to improve our connections from Santa Cruz to Watsonville,” said District 1 Supervisor Manu Koenig.

The RTC recently got a big boost from California, almost a $130 million in grant money to fund more projects like this, as well as a segment of the rail trail.

“Soon as they took the fences down I was up riding it, it’s a little out of my way but it makes things safer, I’ve been coming through here and enjoying the art and the shadows being cast by the whales on the concrete.”

Jack brown has been cycling in the area for years, and he said his commute just a got a major upgrade.

“I would take Soquel Drive and then have to contend with people trying to get on Highway 1 so I’ve had a lot of close calls because of that.”

Measure D and state money will continue to fund protections for bike lanes like the bollards on Soquel that went up in June.

"Each one of those bollards has a little plastic cap on each one of them, and when they get hit this cap falls off because it’s not glued down."

Brown tediously counted all 540 bollards along his Soquel commute and determined that all but 39 had already been mowed over by a car.

"And that’s 93 percent intrusion rate into those bike lanes still, and that’s why protected bike lanes are so important to our community," he said.

Studies suggest better bike and pedestrian infrastructure leads to more people leaving the car in the garage, which in turn leads to more demand for continued infrastructure developments and potentially more funding for them.

The completion of the Whale Bridge is an early step of a near $80 million project to make Santa Cruz and Watsonville better connected through biking, walking, and busses.
The next steps include creating bus-on shoulder lanes between Capitola and Aptos.