Capital Southeast Connector Area
Traffic Samples: El Dorado Hills Congestion
The Photo
above is US 50 eastbound traffic in El Dorado Hills, approaching the El
Dorado Hills Blvd/Latrobe Road exit in an afternoon peak period.
This was on a Thursday in the summer of 2009.
Which
Connector municipality is most vulnerable to traffic congestion on its
local freeway, US 50 or US 99? Monitoring live traffic depicted in Google Earth's Traffic Layer shows this clearly to be El Dorado Hills.
The Connector's goals of reducing regional traffic on surface streets
and on US 50 are more important to El Dorado Hills than to Folsom,
Rancho Cordova, and Elk Grove.
Google
Earth Traffic color coding is conservative with respect to traffic
speed producing saturated flow. Free Flow Speed through El Dorado
Hills, sampled through Google Earth, typically is in the range of 70 to
76 mph. The corresponding saturation speed (boundary between LOS E and LOS F) is 53.3 mph.
Googles's color coding for dots associated with vehicles carrying GPS-enabled cell phones is approximately this:
 | Black | 0 - 10 mph |
 | Red | 10 - 20 mph |
 | Yellow | 20 - 45 mph |
 | Green | 45 mph and higher |
How bad can US 50 congestion be in the El Dorado Hills area? Here's a Google Earth Traffic snapshot from July 4, 2009, about 5 p.m..
In
short, eastbound traffic was slowing to at most 20 mph at Scott
Road/East Bidwell in Folsom, then to at most 10 mph as it began
climbing the 12% grade to El Dorado Hills. Traffic stayed at less than
10 mph for almost the entire width of El Dorado Hills, only rising
above 10 mph at the top of the Bass Lake Grade.
High resolution
images for the 7/4/2009 traffic sample, the entire sample set
taken on 7/23/2010, and a small number of other samples are in the
directory at http://www.sierrafoot.org/civics/connector_jpa/google_traffic/.
Detail pages for the Connector JPA discussion are:
Google
Earth Traffic color coding is conservative with respect to traffic
speed producing saturated flow. Free Flow Speed through El Dorado
Hills, sampled through Google Earth, typically is in the range of 70 to
76 mph. The corresponding saturation speed (boundary between LOS E and LOS F) is 53.3 mph.