Construction has long been under way on Highway 101 between Milpas Street and Hot Springs Road, and patience may be wearing thin among some Santa Barbara County drivers — if reader emails to Noozhawk are any indication.
“It’s crazy how long this project is taking, and considering the traffic mess, it causes a significant headache to thousands,” one reader wrote. “They build cities in China faster than we can finish a four-lane bridge.”
Noozhawk checked in with Kirsten Ayars, the community outreach liaison for the multiagency project, to confirm whether the work is on schedule and when drivers can expect to see it finished.
“The project started in July 2008 and was always scheduled to take four years to complete,” Ayars said Monday.
It’s a big project, and Ayars estimated that the project will be completed by early this summer.
The operational improvements taking place between Milpas and Hot Springs include the reconstruction of two major interchanges, six new or improved bridges, freeway widening, and improvements to local streets and pedestrian pathways.
The $57 million project is funded by Proposition 1B, $13 million in Measure D funding, as well as state and federal gas taxes. It’s a joint effort of the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, Caltrans, and the City of Santa Barbara highway and local street improvement program.
The project is actually ahead of schedule at this point, with many of the improvements opening early — including the Montecito Roundabout. However, plenty of work is continuing.
“Most recently, there has been a lot of work on Highway 101 to finish up the median improvements and safety barriers on the new bridges,” Ayars said. “This is a large project with a lot of components. To some it may look like the project is almost finished, and it is.”
But there is still a significant amount of work to do under the bridges at Milpas and Cacique streets. The Milpas Street bridges need to be sandblasted and sealed, and the sidewalks, handrails and gutters also need to be completed, along with curbs and gutters. This will take a few months to complete.
Many minor details also need to be wrapped up.
The sidewalks in the area have been poured, Ayars said, but the handrails and lights are being repainted, and the old cornstalk design had to be sent out of town to be refurbished.
With early summer as a ballpark date for the completion, weather will play a critical role as the project finishes up.
“One of the last items will be to repave the freeway,” Ayars said, “and we’ll need temperatures at night that consistently meet minimum standards in order to get that accomplished, as it is a multiple night component to get the paving done and restriped.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
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