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Toll option remains as cost for Narrows rises to $800 million

NORTH BAY – Transportation officials continue to take a closer look at tolls as a way to ease congestion and help cover the escalating cost of widening Highway 101 between Novato and Petaluma, with the most recent estimate showing the project’s price tag climbing to $800 million.

Supporters of the widening project – previously estimated to cost $600 million – received some good news Sept. 19 when the California Transportation Commission awarded $15.4 million to help design two new interchanges and add a stretch of carpool lane in northern Novato.

Those improvements would become the first phases of the overall project to upgrade the 17-mile stretch of four-lane highway known as the Sonoma-Marin Narrows to a six-lane freeway.

However, the $207 million collected so far for the overall project leaves a sizeable gap in funding. Officials expect that the state and federal governments will contribute more money in future years, but some say that those funds may not be enough.

“It may be that the Narrows will also have to seriously consider having some portion of the funding come from a user-pay program, but we haven’t started down that path yet,” said Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey, who is co-chairman of the Transportation Authority of Marin, one of the agencies sponsoring the project.

That agency’s Executive Director, Dianne Steinhauser, said her staff would “take a more detailed look” at the possibility of tolling over the next six months.

According to Ms. Steinhauser, the most likely type of toll would be an optional fee that allowed solo drivers to use new and existing carpool lanes through the Narrows and elsewhere along the 101 corridor. Transportation agencies could borrow against future tolls to help finance the narrows project.

Tolling along Highway 101 has been discussed for years. In 2000, a study commissioned by the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission concluded that optional, high-occupancy tolling between State Route 37 and the Marin-Sonoma county line could generate up to $55 million over 30 years. The agency says that adding tolls further north could increase that revenue.

“My agency believes at this point that tolling ought to play a larger roll,” said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the MTC, which oversees transportation funding in the nine-county Bay Area.

But Mr. Rentschler cautioned that tolls alone will not generate the type of “big money” needed for the Narrows. He said that traditional, state and federal funding will have to play the biggest role in the project, and that his agency is advocating for higher gasoline taxes to make more money available.

  In the meantime, North Bay business leaders continue to complain that congestion on Highway 101 restricts the flow of goods and lengthens employees’ commutes.

“The drive through the Sonoma-Marin Narrows is often times very slow and very challenging and adds to the already extended commute time for our employees who live in Petaluma and points north,” said Doug Martin, a vice president for Novato-based Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co.

According to Mr. Martin, nearly  40 percent of his company’s 1,200 Novato employees commute from Sonoma County via Highway 101. “It’s retention, quality of life (and) productivity,” he said of the effects of congestion.