More traffic for Bottleneck Junction
on the web at: https://sodacanyonroad.org/forum.php?p=1516
Bill Hocker | May 1, 2019


think the traffic is bad now?

Update 5/1/19 Nova Wine Warehouse
NVR 5/1/19: Napa County approves large wine warehouse

At the Planning Commission hearing on the Nova Wine Warehouse the LIUNA union lawyer argued that cumulative traffic impacts had not been considered in the Mitigated Negative Declaration for the project. Comm. Hansen, in supporting the project, stated that cumulative impacts had been considered in the Specific Plan developed for the entire district and didn't need to be considered on an individual-project basis.

The Napa Business Park Specific Plan and EIR was done in 1985. In discussing traffic impacts, it made some mitigating assumptions: by the year 2000 the Soscol/29 and Jameson/29 junctions would be grade-separated interchanges and that Hwy 29 would be 6 lanes; by 2015, the Jameson interchange would have loop ramp access and that a secondary north-south road would link the entire site. By 2015 it projected peak-hour one-way traffic on 29 at the junctions would be 3600 vehicles. (In 2019 the infrastructure mitigations are still unlikely to happen any time soon. And the actual peak-hour one-way traffic in 2015 was 4600 vehicles.)

Even with the proposed mitigations the EIR concluded:
"By the buildout condition (i.e., in 50 to 60 years, according to Table 10), traffic congestion will be a serious constraint in the planning area vicinity, assuming that current industrial characteristics, transportation patterns and habits continue well into the 21st century. Regional roadways will become congested (even with recommended improvements) and congestion on local roadways will be a serious problem."

There is a similar conclusion in the 2018 EIR which was done for the Airport Corporate Center discussed below: "Transportation impacts remain significant and unavoidable:"

Comm. Hansen is right to say that traffic impacts were considered in the Specific Plan. But then they were ignored. And the mitigations didn't happen. Whatever their real motives, LIUNA is right to bring the impacts up again. There is a legitimate question about a planning process that promotes building development, goes through an elaborate process to show the development will cause problems in the future, and then ignores the problems in the holy name of promoting growth. One questions why a planning process is needed in the first place.

Update 4/23/19
The County Planning Commission will be taking up the Nova Wine Warehouse use permit application at their May 1, 2019 meeting. Agenda and Documents here.

It is 400,500 sf with parking for 263 vehicles that will add to the bottleneck and 20-40 new employees looking for housing. A Neg dec was issued with less-than-significant impacts according to staff, as usual.

The interesting thing about this project is that it has received a CEQA challenge (biological resources, air quality, traffic, stormwater) by a union, the Laborers International Union of North America representing construction workers. (This is the second project to run up against union opposition - Watson Ranch the other.) The Union's concern for the health of the environment, and its willingness to invest in the consultants and lawyers needed to protect it, is commendable - assuming no other motive. As happened with Napa Airport Corporate Center, a full EIR would probably show traffic and air quality impacts will "remain significant and unavoidable". Unfortunately, it would probably be approved anyway.

One side note: while all warehouse buildings are apparently now required to have the structural capability to support solar collectors, the county has not put in place a policy requiring the installation of panels. Instead, in approving its first solar farm and setting a really bad precedent, the County has decided to use up agricultural land for the purpose. An initial BOS discussion was held regarding solar farm regulations, and while the use of industrial buildings and parking lots was discussed as possible locations for solar farms, nothing was suggested to make it so.

Update 3/8/19 unnamed warehouse
NVR 3/8/19: American Canyon's latest wine warehouse overcomes location concerns

330,00 sf, 204-559 more trips/day.

Update 8/26/18 Napa Airport Corporate Center
NVR 8/26/18: American Canyon Council approves more warehouses parallel with Highway 29

It's not quite clear how the traffic analysis dropped from 4900 to 1100 trips/day - which is still a lot and caused a resident to respond: Alleviate traffic in American Canyon - not make it worse. Not to mention the cancer. Of course 1100 trips is a drop in the bucket compared to Napa Logistics soon-to-be-added 11,700 trip/day

Update 6/14/18 Nova Wine Warehouse
Another huge concrete box will be up for a use permit before the County Planning Commission on July 18th, 2018. The Nova Wine Warehouse will add 400,500 sf of space, 263 parking spaces, 80 loading bays 20-40 more employees to the congestion in this already badly congestion location. This follows the proposal down the road of another similar sized warehouse project which, unlike this one, went through the EIR process ending with a liftiny of significant and unavoidable traffic and cancer causing impacts. Will this project, and every project proposed in these two industrial zones, do anything but add to those significant and unavoidable impacts? As the EIR pointed out, there are no traffic fixes on the horizon.

There seems to be no end to the desire to link the urban sprawl of Napa with that of American Canyon to bring traffic in this bottleneck to a complete standstill while making the grand entry to the fabled Napa Valley as charming as a traffic jam on I-80 through Oakland. In an abstract effort to concentrate urban development lust in the south county, the ultimate buildout of American Canyon and of these industrial areas have never been considered from a regional traffic standpoint. Once the traffic is bad enough, the thinking seems to be, someone will build some flyovers, or freeways or something. NVTA, responsible for transportation projects in the south county, doesn't see that happening.

As an aside, in this case the project will fill in the lowlands surrounding the historic and bucolic Rocca Winery and tasting room, destroying their isolation and bringing noise and cancerous pollution from the vehicles looping around their property each day. A parking lot and blank wall of the project push up against and ignore the wooded meander of Soscol creek. This is not the 19th century. Creeks should be planned for human enjoyment, not left to become the forgotten back alleys of industrial operations.

The County Nova page is here
The hearing notice is here

Update 5/31/18 Napa Airport Corporate Center
NVR 5/31/18: New warehouses proposed along Highway 29 corridor in American Canyon

Video, Agenda and documents of the 5/24/18 American Canyon Planning Commission Hearing

The American Canyon Planning Commission has just approved another bunch of warehouses that will generate 4900 more trips per day to add to the traffic jam through American Canyon and south Napa that is Bottleneck Junction. Along with Napa Logistics Park it will clog up the S. Kelly Rd intersection to match the Jameson Canyon intersection. The project will also, incidentally, increase the cancer risk for American Canyon Residents!

From the staff summary of the proposed project EIR:

"Air quality impacts remain significant and unavoidable:"
-"The operational emissions from the total project evaluated in the EIR exceed the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's (BAAQMD) thresholds of significance for Nitrogen Oxides"
-"A community health risk assessment was prepared because of the proximity of two residences to the project site and found that the increase in cancer risk because of the project construction and operation exceeded the BAAQMD significance threshold"
-"Project Greenhouse Gas (GHG) gas emissions would exceed the BAAQMD threshold of significance"

"Transportation impacts remain significant and unavoidable:"
-" The addition of Project traffic to existing conditions would result in the [4] following intersections operating at unacceptable level..."
-"The addition of Project traffic to existing conditions together with other pending projects (background development) would result in the following [7] intersections operating at unacceptable levels..."
-"The addition of Project traffic to projected cumulative traffic conditions would result in unacceptable levels of service at 13 intersections"
-"the proposed project may conflict with the Napa and Solano County congestion management plans"
-And "While improvements have been identified to address these impacts, most of them are under Caltrans jurisdiction and funding and plans have not been approved. Therefore, there is uncertainty about whether the improvements would be implemented, so the impacts remain significant and unavoidable"

The solution to significant and unavoidable impacts that endanger the lives of Am Can residents and make traffic worse for everyone commuting to and from the Napa Valley? Draft some Findings of Overriding Consideration. All ten findings can be questioned on their merits, but these 2 are pet peeves:

"7. The Project will facilitate the logical and orderly development of the Devlin Road corridor in accordance with the City of American Canyon General Plan and Napa County Airport"

As we know from the 2008 changes made to Napa County's General Plan to equate winery tourism with agriculture, industry insiders shape general plans to their financial advantage. American Canyon's General plan is in fact just a developer's wish list for turning raw land into buildings. Almost every square inch of the City is to be developed into housing or commercial projects and the governmental projects needed to serve them. The Land use element is here. It is ludicrous to argue that an overriding consideration to significant and unavoidable impacts is that we have a plan that creates significant and unavoidable impacts. (as does the Napa County General Plan.)

"10. The Project will contribute to the long?term fiscal health of the City by generating new taxable sales, development impact fees, business license fees, property tax, and other sources of revenue."

As Volker Eisele warned:
Development doesn't pay for itself. It doesn't. [If] you are looking at Napa Pipe now in south Napa, where a developer again is circulating memos showing how much profit it would generate, the profit might be actually true but it isn't really profit, because the cost items are all left out, whether it's traffic, clean air, noise, health, education and other items [concerning] social welfare.

Residents of American Canyon, the County and the State will end up subsidizing this project through increased taxes and bond measures to pay for the infrastructure and service costs that are never covered by the project's mitigation fees. Again ask yourself, do big city residents pay more or less in taxes to support their government? Are large cities fiscally healthier than small towns? Will the city end up spending more to maintain and service 30 acres of industrial development or 30 acres of wetlands?

The city is already desperate (with a $1.2 loss in 2016) for the revenue generated by this project to help pay for the long term burdens of previous urban development. How much will residents have to pay for the road widenings, and intersection upgrades and eventual freeways needed for the thousands of additional daily vehicle trips generated by this project and Napa Logistics Park? How much more for the services and infrastructure upgrades that an increased daily population will need?

It's not like the County is being flooded by immigrants looking for jobs and homes. The long-term population growth in Napa County is projected to be less than .5%/yr. These building projects are inducing population growth in the county (and the impacts that come with it) so that a handful of developers can make some money.

The solution to Napa County's urban problems of traffic and lack of affordable and ever rising taxes and bond measures to pay for increased infrastructure is to stop urbanizing. Develop a general plan created by residents who must live with the results rather than businessmen who profit off it.

Update 5/24/18 Trinitas Hotel-Winery
The Trinitas Mixed Use (Marriott Hotel-Winery-Office Bldg) complex is up before the Airport Land Use Commission (County Planning Commission + 2) on June 6, 2018. It is a 253 room hotel, 25,000 sf winery (no capacity or visitation specified but 57 parking spaces allowed), 30,000 sf office bldg, and 441 total parking spaces.
The notice is here
The project documents are here (large file)

Is it compatible next to the airport? No less than the Meritage or the County office buildings, one would assume. Will the current traffic jam at the entrance to the airport, made that much worse by one more huge project up the road, be discussed? Probably not.

6/2/17 Trinitas Hotel-Winery
NVR 6/2/17: Design of south Napa Marriott hotel leaves city planners cold
NVR 6/1/17: Napa planners to get first a look at a Marriott hotel, winery
The project documents are here (large file)

The Napa City Planning Commission seems to have focused on the uninspired architecture floating in a sea of cars. One always hopes for good urban design, but the other chain-tenant shopping plazas and car dealerships they have approved on Soscol don't offer much guidance to the designers. What was not discussed, apparently, was the impact of another few hundred vehicles coming and going each day (not to mention concerns about housing the project's workers) in this increasingly bottlenecked area of the county, once again highlighting the way in which the municipalities' development lust ignores impacts down the road (literally).

The junction between Hwy 29 and Hwy 12 has become ground zero in the carrying capacity of Napa County, with traffic congestion at the top of everyone's negative list about the county.

The fact that both visitors and workers are turned off by the commute is a good thing for those of us wishing to slow the urban development currently happening up valley. And that attitude seems to be taking hold in the county as well. The Napa Valley Transportation Authority recently decided against enlarging Hwy 29 at the junction. Building transport infrastructure just induces more development to fill the increased capacity, the reasoning goes. The theory, though perhaps not expressed directly at the meeting, is that you can control urban development just by making it impossible to get to the development sites. That theory was at the heart of the decision in the 1970's to stop building freeways in Napa county beyond the one small stretch through Napa City.

Unfortunately, based on approved projects, the bottleneck at this junction is only just beginning to build. Besides the many building projects in the pipeline further up valley that will be adding all of their visitors and employees to this junction, the proposed development around the junction itself, which the Marriott project again shines a light upon, is enough to make any traffic engineer blanch. It includes:

These projects will add tens of thousands of vehicle trips per day to the traffic already there. The gridlock distances and hours will continue to expand. The legal problem is that all of the developers already with approvals are now expecting government to insure that people can get to their projects, and they will exert a lot of pressure. And the municipalities, concerned as always only with economic expansion and no concern about the urbanizing pressure their developments exert on the unincorporated county, have no interest in limiting access. Even residents who see the value of preserving what is left of unurbanized Napa will not tolerate an hour to get through the junction for long. And, because these are state highways, Caltrans will be forced to do something. The county's desire to disincentivize urban growth by limiting access will be forced to mitigate the traffic they have already sanctioned before they can implement a restriction plan - or be sued. The road will have to be widened to 6 lanes and the Soscol flyover built. Napa residents and state residents will have to come up with the money to do it. But what happens after that? Once built the increased access will induce more development. And so on.

Controlling urban growth by limiting access is only half of the solution needed. The other must be to stop granting use permits and building permits, based on the unacceptable impact they will have to the access needed for businesses already in existence and those already approved. Unfortunately, since the Marriott is within the city's southern gerrymander, little can be done. But if the county is serious in their access restricting strategy, then the next step beyond saying no to infrastructure projects is to start saying no to new development throughout the county. It is either that or to begin making plans for the Hwy 12 and 29 freeways that will inevitably be necessary.

At every planning hearing, government officials and some residents have stars in their eyes over the tax revenues and fees projects are expected to bring. It is only years later that the real cost of those approvals are known. The widening of Hwy 29 and the Soscol flyover will cost about $150 million - just one of numerous infrastructure and service costs taxpayers must bear to insure that developers can make profitable investments. "Development doesn't pay for itself. It doesn't." Volker Eisele is sorely missed.
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