I have lived in Santa Barbara long enough to remember when Highway 101 construction was a transportation project.

Those were innocent times.

Today, widening the freeway is better understood as one of our enduring civic institutions, alongside the Santa Barbara Mission, Fiesta, UC Santa Barbara and complaining about housing.

The current era began in the summer of 2008, when President Barack Obama was still a candidate, the iPhone was a year old and Netflix mostly mailed DVDs.

A child born the week the first Highway 101 cone went down can now vote. If the schedule holds, construction finishes in late 2028 and landscaping in 2029, when that child can legally drink.

Many of us will join them.

I emphasize “if the schedule holds.” Santa Barbarans know better than to speak recklessly around the highway gods.

For perspective: the Golden Gate Bridge took about four years to build. The transcontinental railroad took six. The Highway 101 widening from Carpinteria to Santa Barbara covers 10.9 miles.

This is unfair, of course. None of the projects had to go through Montecito.

That alone probably explains a dozen years.

There are good reasons it has taken so long: environmental reviews, funding cycles, creek crossings, bridges, interchanges, multiple jurisdictions and the inconvenient requirement that the freeway be widened and substantial portions rebuilt while thousands of us drive on it every day.

I understand this intellectually.

Emotionally, I believe the orange cones reproduce at night.

They now appear to be a dominant species of the South Coast. Children assume they grow here, like agave. I propose making the cone Santa Barbara County’s official flower.

Future archaeologists will find long ceremonial rows of cones running from Carpinteria toward downtown and conclude that we worshipped them, traveling slowly between them on some elaborate pilgrimage.

They will not be entirely wrong.

Some of us no longer give directions using streets: “Go past where the lanes used to shift, stay left at the temporary ramp that used to be on the right, and when traffic stops for no discernible reason, you’re almost there.”

Everyone understands.

The project has also given us a new relationship with the word “temporary.” Temporary lane. Temporary barrier. Temporary ramp. Temporary traffic pattern.

After 18 years, Santa Barbara is entitled to a philosophical question: At what point does the temporary become the permanent?

Martin Heidegger wrote at length about Being and Time but never tried to merge onto the 101 at Sheffield Drive. Twentieth-century philosophy might have gone very differently.

My own field has something to add.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel had students disrupt ordinary routines, acting like boarders in their own parents’ homes, to see how people restore order.

Caltrans has run the same experiment on an entire region for nearly two decades.

The findings are in: People adapt. They learn the detour. Then the detour moves.

Eventually you no longer have a route to work. You have a relationship with one.

And it’s complicated.

Then there is the money. The current construction figure so far is about $700 million, roughly $64 million a mile, or about a thousand dollars an inch. Somewhere in Montecito is an inch of concrete that cost more than my first car.

I have driven over it.

I could not feel the difference.

In Santa Barbara units, $700 million is about two modest houses. Possibly three, if none has an ocean view.

And what, after all this, is the project’s most visible prize for the ordinary driver?

Another lane.

That sentence deserves quiet contemplation.

Granted, not an ordinary lane. A peak-period carpool lane, reserved at rush hour for cars carrying two or more people, in a region where most of us drive alone.

Off-peak it turns back into a regular lane, like Cinderella’s coach at midnight, only more expensive.

After this much engineering, financing and collective suffering, calling them merely “lanes” seems disrespectful.

Local families could sponsor them: “The Marjorie and Robert Jenkins Memorial Northbound HOV Lane.” Naming rights might close the next funding gap.

And yet I feel strangely affectionate toward the whole enterprise. Its completion may bring an unexpected civic melancholy.

Imagine driving south one morning in 2028. No cones. No barriers. No sign announcing that the off-ramp you have used since 1997 will disappear Tuesday and return sometime during the next presidential administration.

Just pavement.

We may panic.

People will pull onto the shoulder and call SBCAG.

“Something’s wrong. Nobody is building anything.”

We will need grief counselors, and a ceremony. The mayor could remove the Last Orange Cone and place it in the historical museum. Schoolchildren will visit, and one will ask why our ancestors moved these back and forth for 20 years.

The teacher will stare toward the mountains.

“We don’t entirely know.”

There is a serious point under the joke. Building major infrastructure in California is genuinely hard, and what looks absurd from the driver’s seat often looks less so from an engineer’s desk.

There is a second serious point. The new lanes are meant to help the thousands of workers who commute in from Ventura County every day, many of whom cannot afford to live here.

We have spent 20 years and $700 million speeding them toward a town many of them cannot afford to call home.

Someday the crews really will pack up. Traffic will flow. Santa Barbara will wake to a strange new world with three lanes in each direction and nobody quite sure what to complain about.

Fortunately, we still have housing.