Here are some photos of remnants of CA State Route Highway 180, in eastern Fresno County. Fresno County is blasting a super highway through some of the most famous California agricultural land. Already, the old farmhouses are boarded up and/or demolished. The ‘For Sale’ signs are springing up, in preparation for the Fresno metropolitan area to sprawl 10 miles east.
Literally “a road-to-nowhere”, this 2-lane highway runs through very remote orchard and ranch land, before heading up into the Sierras and dead-ending at Roads End in Kings Canyon National Park. This project was funded through the American Recovery Act (“stimulus” dollars). Unless the Obama Administration makes radical shifts in its transportation priorities, auto bailouts and sprawl highways will be its legacy.
Farming road permanently severed
How SR-180 will eventually look:
I’m no fan of new highways in great agricultural land, but please don’t call a National Park “nowhere”. Instead you should be asking for transit to reach more national parks.
I just came back from Kings Canyon (which was my destintaion so clearly NOT “nowhere” – jeez Jeremy don’t be such a literalist) and the sight of this giant freeway chewing up farmland was nothing short of an obscenity.
We had lunch in “downtown” Fresno and we passed mile after mile of boarded up and derelict buildings to get to the restaurant. Fresno needs to concentrate on it’s center – which ought to be obvious to everyone.
I wonder who is making big bucks on this whole boondoggle as there is some sort of mine planned for one of the mtns just north of 180 in Oakhurst.
The whole thing stinks!
The most shocking part about this enormous waste of money is that as far as I can tell, there is zero local opposition. Fresno is supposedly tea-party center in California, and yet nobody is organizing rallies against this enormous government waste.
And the government says that we need to curb sprawl to save the farmlands, the air quality and revive downtown, and then turns around and funds a sprawl machine. It’s madness.
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