2023 Crown Communities Award winner: Two massive projects help relieve traffic problems

Traffic congestion is an issue facing cities of all sizes, affecting commutes, the economy, the environment and the mental health of everyone stuck in it.

The city of Victorville, Calif. was no stranger to traffic woes. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad runs north/south through the city of Victorville, and for years, there were only two crossing areas for drivers at the north (Highway 18) and south (Bear Valley Road) sides of the city, limiting drivers’ ability to get from the east to the west side, increasing commute times and creating a lot of traffic congestion issues. Traffic and congestion were only made worse by emergency incidents that would cut off one of the two crossing points, adding 30-45 minutes to commutes, as drivers had to go all the way around to the unaffected crossing. And as the city and population grew, so did the traffic woes. Something had to be done.

“This is an issue that has been prevalent for a very long time for the city of Victorville and not only the city of Victorville, but also for the county of San Bernardino and the town of Apple Valley, and even some of the residents of the city of Hesperia,” says Harry Mayo, senior civil engineer for the city of Victorville.

After years of planning, Victorville recently completed two massive projects to help alleviate the traffic problems on Interstate 15—the Bear Valley Road Overhead at the BNSF and the Green Tree Boulevard Extension. It is these two projects that have been chosen as one of the 2023 American City & County Crown Communities Awards.

“The average daily traffic on Bear Valley Road exceeds 50,000 vehicles a day,” says Fredy Bonilla, city engineer for the city of Victorville. “A lot of these projects got started under the tenure of our former city engineer who retired last year and he was pushing Cal-Trans to be able to authorize the project so that we wouldn’t have them in construction simultaneously. As luck would have it, we got the E-76, or basically the notice to proceed and the federal funds for both projects within a few months of each other, so they were actually in construction simultaneously.” The Green Tree project kicked off first, and the Bear Valley Road bridge widening got started shortly after.

Green Tree Boulevard
“The principal reason for the construction of the Green Tree Bridge and the extension of Green Tree Boulevard was ultimately to provide an alternate path of travel to get across the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad that basically divides the desert communities and limits access from everybody to the east of the railroad to the Interstate 15 freeway,” Mayo says.

The Green Tree Boulevard Extension is a new third crossing that cuts right through the center of Victorville, and is the final phase of a 10-year, multi-jurisdictional project. “This project was conceived when I was a kid,” Mayo says. “And it’s been in the works for a very long time. But it didn’t actually come to fruition until, I think we got really serious about it back in about 2008 I believe, but prior to that, it was just kind of a line on a map.”

The entire three-phase Yucca Loma Road/Yates Road/Green Tree Boulevard corridor project was a collaboration between Victorville, Apple Valley and San Bernardino County, partnering with Dokken Engineering for the procurement of environmental permits, right of way acquisition and preparation of the project plans, specifications and engineering. The first two phases started in Apple Valley, with the improvement of Yucca Loma Road and the building of the Yucca Looma Bridge across the Mojave River. “That further extended into the county portion, where they improved Yates Road, which kind of goes on the north side of Spring Valley Lake,” Mayo explains. Those phases were completed in 2017.

Construction on the Green Tree Boulevard Extension began in the summer of 2021. Parsons Transportation Group provided construction management services, supervising the work performed by Skanska USA Civil West. The project was completed in June 2023 with a price tag of $47 million utilizing local and federal funding.

Building a bridge over railroad tracks is no easy project, and the Green Tree project required cooperation and coordination with the BNSF Railroad at every step. “We did get agreements with the railroad,” Mayo says. “We had to have their input on the design of the bridge and clearance requirements and the span and everything like that.” Mayo says BNSF was involved throughout the entire duration of the project, with road flaggers and safety people reviewing and observing the work, making sure it wouldn’t cause delays with the track.

Mayo says that BNSF considers that section of their rail line to be the busiest railroad in the nation. “You have a train every 17 minutes,” Mayo says. “So, there was a tremendous amount of coordination effort required, because certain stages of construction would require us to get permission from the railroad to basically stopped traffic on one track or both tracks for any particular item of construction activity. And those work windows were short and difficult to get, but necessary.”

One major challenge was doing construction during the fourth quarter, which is the busiest time of year for the railroad, shipping product between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. The Green Tree Bridge had three spans, and Mayo says they had to get everything erected and constructed over the tracks within the first three quarters of the year.

“So, they generally do not allow any construction activity to proceed during the fourth quarter of the year within their right of way, or if they do it’s on a limited basis,” Mayo says, adding they were able to work on the abutments of the bridge on each side, and work on anything outside of the railroad right of way.

“We did hire a consultant to manage the construction of this project, principally just because of our lack of experience when it comes to working on bridges,” Mayo says. “So, we basically had a bridge RE, who worked with the contractor, who oversaw the day-to-day work during construction of the project, to ensure that the construction schedules were met, the submittals were approved, all of that stuff, to ultimately deliver a good project on time.”

Doing a project collectively with other jurisdictions has its complexities, including how it effects the environment across the different areas. “There actually was a significant amount of environmental impact associated with this project,” Mayo says. “The city, the county and the town of Apple Valley all had to go into a joint agreement with the environmental agencies to mitigate the permanent impacts of the project.” Doing this enabled them to get ahead of any environmental issues.

“This project is a little bit unique because we’ve mitigated our environmental impact before we actually finished our phase of the project,” Mayo says. “We were able to get through the maintenance term required by the environmental agencies to establish those areas right about the time when the project started, so we were cleared of all our environmental commitments when it comes to restoration of permanent habitat as opposed to the impacts that we made to the other stuff. We did have some other environmental issues during construction that were just temporary impacts, but a lot of the stuff we actually did beforehand. That’s typical of most agencies to have to address the environmental issue during construction, but because of the phasing this project, it was caught up front instead of at the end.”

Bear Valley Road
Another traffic problem Victorville faced was the high volume of eastbound traffic on Bear Valley Road that would then turn north on Ridgecrest Road, backing up all the way to Industrial Boulevard, Mayo says, and the number one lane would get backed up and cause congestion getting across the railroad. “So, while the Green Tree Bridge was being developed and going through all of the design phases, and phases of construction, the city basically went through the process of looking for a consultant to address the issue with [the Bear Valley Road] bridge, because it was considered structurally deficient because it didn’t meet the demands for the traffic through the area.” And again, if there was an accident on that road, it would create more havoc, because the road is a major crossing through Victorville that serves all the cities, including the county. “It’s also a major truck route for transportation,” Mayo adds. “There’s a lot of big wide loads that have a tendency to come this route. So, the project was to relieve those congestion issues and to improve the level of service at this crossing.”

Bonilla explains that the existing crossing, which had three lanes running in each direction, was substandard. “They weren’t wide enough,” he says. “And so, as part of the project, we widened onto standard lines, we provided a median, put in sidewalk improvements, and then we did a couple of traffic signal modifications at the Ridgecrest Road and Industrial to be able to accommodate the widened lanes.”

City, state and federal grant funding financed the development of plans, specifications, engineering, construction management and construction of the project, with Dokken Engineering provided PS&E, right of way certification and environmental services. Parsons Transportation Group provided construction management services, and Riverside Construction Co. did the work. The project was completed in November 2023 with a price tag of $11.3 million.

How do you do construction project to improve traffic issues without creating traffic issues? With careful and clever planning. “During construction, what we did is we narrowed the width of each lane a little bit to shift the lanes over to provide enough room for the contractor to work on one side of the bridge and then the other side,” Mayo says. “So, they basically did the work in two phases. They started on the south side of the bridge and basically widened it, put in the curb, gutter and sidewalk and then we did the paving on the south side. And then they moved to the north side. So, lanes were just basically shifted a little bit to provide that room and then they would put K roll in place to kind of protect their work zone so that way nobody would drive into where they were working.”

Mayo says the impact on traffic during construction was minimal, other than the lanes being a bit narrower, which did slow traffic down a little. There were a few instances with almost a full closure when only two lanes were open when they were placing precast girders on the bridge, but, Mayo says, that was done at night.

Now that both projects are completed, Mayo and Bonilla say they can see the improvement in traffic around Victorville. Mayo says now people can go straight through town to get over the freeway commuting to work, and Bonilla says reports have shown that a lot of people are now using the Green Tree extension, so much so that “we saw a reduction of like 25% on the traffic counts on Bear Valley Road, because now you have an alternate route, right? And the feedback that we got from our community was overwhelmingly positive, because we heard that on average, the commute time was at least eight to 10 minutes faster. Some cases were as 15 minutes faster because of Green Tree.”

Another benefit of the new traffic flow is economic growth. Bonilla says there is a commercial development that was recently entitled at the corner of Green Tree and Hesperia Road. “That will be the first portion of development that will come in along the new road, but we’ve seen pre-submittals on potentially additional residential tracts on the north side of Green Tree, because now you’ve got access to be able to get in there,” he says. “Now that you’ve got access, and now that you’ve got the wet utility infrastructure, we expect to see a development boom along this corridor. The traffic is there.”

Bonilla says the new commercial development is hoping to break ground this year. “If that project is successful, and it’s a multi-tenant commercial center, I could see additional projects along this corridor, and hopefully, we see more development there because, as Harry [Mayo] indicated at the beginning, the bulk of the money that was spent on this project for development impact fees. And so, it’s good to see more development so that we can continue to generate that revenue for other projects in the future. Sort of the gift that keeps on giving.”

Do you have a project to nominate for the 2024 Crown Communities Awards? Nominations are now being excepted through Dec. 2, 2024.