Edhat Staff
Update by the edhat staff
Around 2:30 p.m., Caltrans reopened one lane of Highway 101 north.
By the edhat staff
A fatal traffic collision took place on Highway 101 north Monday morning at Solimar Beach.
Around 9:30 a.m., California Highway Patrol (CHP) and Ventura County firefighters responded to the northbound lanes in Dulah, closest to Amphitheatre Road.
CHP reports a black Honda CRV collided with a ulitity truck which caused both vehicles to catch fire, including a third vehicle, a red sedan.
Witnesses in the area called in the collision and stated that all lanes are blocked due to the collision and visibility is limited due to a large amount of black smoke. Northbound traffic was at a standstill.
Emergency responders shut down the northbound lanes and set up a hard closure at State Beaches. Traffic was rerouted to Highway 33 through Ojai.
CHP states there is a fatality due to this collision, although no further details are available.
It’s unclear how many vehicles are involved but CHP’s initial report is there may be up to five.
This is a developing story.
By Anna Marie Gott
All lanes North bound lanes except PCH HWY 1 are closed.
HWY 101 backed up past California Street exit.
SB probably needs a new bypass freeway along the SB mtns. and skip the on and off ramps.
Turn the old 101 into a Business route.
Or build the bypass freeway out in the channel?
And maybe there should be a regular ferry boat system to Ventura and LA or SD.
And some trains that cater to auto transport.
But with new technology, after the EMTs and FD and Tow Trucks leave, the policy should be a more rapid clearing of debris and reopening the roads. or it should not take hours,
And if Caltrans wants slower speeds, just detour the traffic on to PCH after Hwy 33.
Or It seems that all the accidents show the current detour is a bad design.
RIP
R.I.P to the driver- I hope the construction mess wasn’t a contributing factor….Wait til we get an 8.0 Earthquake and all the bridges and road infrastructure are hammered. SB, SYV and SM will be “islands” due to the road closures…
Thank you for providing this information. RIP to the deceased. This unfortunate situation further illustrates the infrastructure limitations of the South Coast. Basically, there is one road in and one road out, given the traffic volume. If our only viable route is impassable, what do we do? During the fire/flood/debris flow disaster of 2017/2018, essential workers from Ventura County were ferried in by boat for approximately a month. Imagine an additional 6,000 SB housing units inhabited by newcomers (who can afford market rate rents), plus the added low wage workers needed when any population increases, adding to the congestion and number of commuters. CA State mandates force unsound planning.
I agree with Vinsb. Emergencies and housing are linked. We need to cut outt any more low income housing and force the people of SB to become more self reliant. Thank you for linking burning cars and housing for us.
JOJOMILO I apologize for not assisting you in connecting the dots: As we all know, there is a shortage of low income (or workforce) housing. Currently, much of Santa Barbara’s low income workforce lives in substandard or overcrowded housing, or they find it necessary to move to places like Ventura County. As things stand today, we have plenty of market rate housing and we lack sufficient workforce housing (Go do an apartment search with $7,000 maximum monthly rents and see the results. Then enter $2000). There is no shortage of expensive, market rate housing. Reread my previous comment. As you can see, building expensive, market rate housing further increases the demand for low income housing and exacerbates the housing crisis. **JOJOMILO My comment did NOT suggest we should oust our low income workforce. I’m afraid your logic is flawed. PS. Do you work in real estate?
Let me pose this question: Is it better to have more traffic going into and coming out of Santa Barbara/Goleta, or is it better to have more housing here? PS: I don’t think the jobs are going away. By the way, I live in a complex very close to my employer, and I often walk to work. My friends tell me I need to buy in Oxnard/Ventura and commute rather than rent. Why?
Let’s mandate a priority of affordable housing and hold back expensive developments so that we can reduce the numbers of commuters coming here from Oxnard and Lompoc to work. Santa Barbara needs to be a complete city with support workers living here in affordable housing. Whatever forces are causing approval of only expensive residential and commercial developments should be controlled by the people, as employers cannot hire support employees from locals at all now; no one is available.
The goal of constructing and providing affordable housing for those working necessary but lower paying jobs in our town is an important one. But due to city, county, and state policies there is simply no way to build anything in Santa Barbara in an inexpensive fashion. To do so would require simplification/streamlining of the permitting and entitlement process, loosening of our strictest in the nation building codes, and providing property tax exemptions for affordable housing.
Wasn’t it you who chastises others for using absolutes like “entirely due to” , which was not part of my comment? The onerous permitting and strictest in the nation permitting is a main driver of the high cost to build in SB, not just in cost to comply but in the time (i.e. time value of money) it takes to get through what can be a multi-year entitlement process. Many of those building codes have nothing to do with safety: like the title 24 efficiency requirements, requirements for solar, prohibition on natural gas, extremely expensive ground water management requirements among others that all significantly impact the cost of construction and have nothing to do with safety. There are also density and height limits that reduce the number of units that can be created on given piece of land. Many of course support these requirements and restrictions while also demanding more affordable housing is a classic case of wanting their cake and eating it to – one thing they want impedes the other thing they want. Separate from construction, you’re missing the number one driver to housing unaffordability in SB, the cost of the raw land, something we simply can’t make more of. What we can do is provide property tax exemptions for affordable housing to offset this, and especially in today’s high interest rate environment, provide low-interest loans for affordable housing projects.
VOICE – so it has nothing to do with the market and desirability of homes in the SB area? It’s all the city’s fault? You’re saying it is entirely due to expensive permitting and adherence to building codes (which keeps homeowner’s safe) and other costs of construction? Again, look where we live. Materials and labor in this town is off the hook as well. 100K in this area buys a kitchen remodel, in other places it buys a brand new 1 bedroom home. That’s not due to permits, that’s due to demand.
Demand is what drives prices up to the point of being unaffordable. That demand begets greed.
We don’t need mandates, I agree, what we need is state built housing that is immune to market forces. We need affordable housing so people can live and work in the same general area. Privatizing affordable housing developments plays right into the market. Time for the State to back it’s mandates with realistic subsidies.