Squid travels the highways and byways with TAMC's incredible tax plan.

Up and Away…Squid asked Santa for a few things this Christmas, with limited success. A seasonal jingle-bell collar for Squid’s bulldog, Rosco P. Coltrane, check. A year’s supply of instant shrimp-flavored ramen, check. A good way to avoid the holiday traffic, nope. Maybe Santa just doesn’t get it, given that he’s got a reindeer-flown sled and all. But with an ever-growing population and ever-aging streets, Squid is getting increasingly tired of sitting in traffic, contributing to climate change and making life harder for cold-weather creatures like Santa’s reindeer.

So Squid will be watching closely as the Transportation Agency for Monterey County starts making its pitch for a county-wide sales tax on the November 2016 ballot. The TAMC board is proposing a 3/8-cent tax increase for 30 years, which would generate an estimated $600 million. The plan is to split that amount 50/50 between regional projects and local projects. TAMC has already worked out a list of how they’d spend their half of the money on regional improvements—widening River Road and adding bike lanes, swapping out the dangerous traffic light on Highway 156 and Castroville Boulevard for a safer highway entrance/exit ramp, roundabouts on Highway 68 to alleviate back-ups at stoplights.

Starting in January, TAMC Executive Director Debbie Hale and other TAMC officials will start making the rounds to speak to all 12 city councils asking for city-level ideas on how to spend the remaining $300 million. They’ll ask each city for the top three to five projects they’d like to see funded, and then the TAMC board will have to figure out which ones to includes in the ballot measure.

Squid imagines things will get really feisty now, considering Squid doesn’t have enough tentacles to list essential transportation improvements. There are obvious needs, like making HIghway 156 into a real, modern highway; widening Imjin to accommodate existing traffic, plus new housing; making more connected bike lanes so people have a choice for how to straight-up avoid traffic jams.

Squid also has a few good ideas of Squid’s own. To avoid the Highway 1 chokepoint at Rio Road, a ferry from Carmel Highlands to Monterey would work nicely. But at the top of Squid’s list: Since Lighthouse Avenue in New Monterey regularly backs up, install a zip line from Lovers Point to Seaside. It would double as a tourist attraction.

If TAMC doesn’t build it, maybe Squid will.