Sacramento – Last Tuesday I left the house at 2:15 for a 3 o’clock thing downtown near the old K Street area. I gave myself 45 minutes because I’m not an idiot. By 3:10 I was still sitting on US 50 just past 39th, watching the Fix 50 barrels slide by like they’d been there since my kids were in middle school. The radio guy on KFBK sounded as worn out as I felt, listing off the same three accidents and the same backup from the I-5 split all the way to Watt. I finally bailed onto surface streets through Oak Park, hit every red light somebody decided was a great idea, and walked in 25 minutes late with my shirt stuck to my back.
“That drive used to take me 18 minutes. Tops.”
I was born here. Raised here. I’ve been driving these roads since the early ’90s when my dad handed me the keys to his old Buick and said “don’t be stupid.” Back then you could actually drive in Sacramento. Not crawl. Not white-knuckle. Drive. Windows down on a warm evening, radio up, maybe catch the river breeze coming off the American somewhere near Discovery Park. Rush hour was a thing, sure, mostly the state workers flooding out around 5. But by 5:45 the roads breathed again. You could get from Arden to midtown without checking your watch every thirty seconds like it owed you money.
“Now? The city feels like it’s holding its breath all day long.”
I’ve got a buddy who moved out to what’s now Elk Grove back when it was still mostly open fields and a couple of stoplights. We used to head down there on weekends to mess around on dirt bikes or grab cheap burgers. The drive back north on 99 at dusk was nothing. You might get behind a tractor or a slow-moving truck, but you passed it and kept moving.
These days that same stretch at 5:30 looks like somebody dumped a bucket of red brake lights from the 5 all the way past Laguna. All those new houses, all those new commuters, all funneled onto the same two or three roads the rest of us have been using since before most of those subdivisions had names. Roseville’s doing the same thing up north. More people, more cars, same old pavement trying to hold it.
They keep telling us the big projects will fix it. I remember when they started tearing up the 50 for Fix 50. Years of orange barrels, overnight lane shifts, and that special kind of rage you get when you’re trying to merge and some guy in a company truck decides today’s the day he’s gonna teach everybody a lesson. They widened it, added some lanes, did the HOV thing. And yeah, for about five minutes after it opened it felt a little better. Then the traffic just grew into the new space like it always does. Same story on the 5, same story on the 80 connector. We build more road, more people show up, and here we are again, staring at taillights.
“It’s not just the volume. It’s the feel of it.”
Back in the day if somebody cut you off you figured they were having a bad day or they were from out of town and didn’t know the roads. Now it feels personal. Everybody’s in a hurry because everybody’s already late because the last three times they tried to go anywhere it took twice as long as it should. Phones don’t help. I see it every day-guy next to me at the light, head down, then the light turns green and he’s still scrolling like the rest of us don’t exist. Or the lifted truck that rides your bumper so close you can read the fine print on his registration in your rearview. We used to wave people in when they needed to merge. Now it’s every man for himself and God help the guy with out-of-state plates.
I still love this place. I love grabbing a beer down near the river or catching a game when the Kings are actually worth watching. I love that you can still find a decent taqueria that hasn’t been turned into a concept. But the traffic is stealing something from all of us. It’s stealing the easy parts of living here—the quick run to pick something up, the spontaneous drive out to Folsom Lake on a Saturday without budgeting an extra hour each way, the simple pleasure of not arriving everywhere already irritated.
My dad used to say Sacramento was a big small town. You could get across it without losing your mind. That version of the city is still in my head when I’m stuck on the 50, but it’s getting harder to find on the actual pavement. We grew. We kept growing. And somewhere along the way we decided the answer to too many cars was more cars and more construction that never quite seems to end.
I don’t have some grand solution. I’m just a guy who’s been sitting in this mess longer than a lot of the people honking behind me have been alive. All I know is it didn’t used to feel like this every single time I left the house. And I miss that version of Sacramento more than I can tell you while I’m sitting in another backup, watching the minutes I’ll never get back tick away on the dashboard clock.
By Bob Siemens,
Sacramento