Every conversation about the paving project starts with Highway 1, but the intersections doing the actual damage to your week run east and west. That is the small piece of information that changes how you plan a Tuesday errand run.
Caltrans is roughly halfway through a two-year rebuild of Highway 1 between Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay, and the way it is affecting resident life is not the way the corridor itself is affecting resident life. The paving crews work at night. The signals work all day, and right now several of them are working with one hand behind their back.
What actually changed under the pavement
To dig up and repave the roadway, crews had to pull the in-pavement detector loops that let traffic signals sense a waiting car. With those gone, several intersections are running on preset traffic signal timing instead of real-time vehicle detection, causing longer and less predictable delays. The signals no longer notice you sitting there on the side street. They cycle on a fixed clock until the loops are reinstalled after paving finishes.
That is the mechanism. Everything else follows from it. Caltrans said traffic detection systems are expected to remain offline until paving work is completed later this summer, followed by restoration and testing. Base paving is scheduled to run through August 2026, so residents should plan around this reality for the balance of the summer rather than expecting week-to-week improvement.
The intersections worth naming
The signals in the project footprint are not equally affected. Two are already on preset timing. Four more are queued up as construction moves south. If you live on the Coastside, these are the names to keep in your head:
- Coronado Street at Highway 1 — currently on preset timing
- Ruisseau Francais Avenue at Highway 1 — currently on preset timing
- North Main Street at Highway 1 — signal loops scheduled for replacement; expect similar treatment
- Highway 92 at Highway 1 — in the queue
- Kelly Avenue at Highway 1 — in the queue, with signals at North Main Street and Kelly Avenue operating on recall and east-west cross traffic particularly affected
- Poplar Avenue at Highway 1 — in the queue
Additional intersections may periodically operate under similar conditions as work progresses, including North Main Street, Highway 92, Kelly Avenue, and Poplar Avenue. If your daily route crosses Highway 1 at any of these, the delay is not the through-traffic. It is the cycle length.
The night window and what it costs you
The trade the project made was daytime disruption for nighttime disruption, and it is worth understanding both sides. Crews perform paving work overnight, necessitating lane closures and one-way traffic control, and drivers should expect minor delays between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. That is the noise window if you live within earshot of the corridor, and it is also the window when a late dinner out in Miramar or a run to the airport becomes a genuinely different drive than it was last summer.
The daytime picture is quieter in terms of equipment but louder in terms of accumulated signal drag. If you have a school pickup that puts you across Highway 1 at 3 p.m., the honest planning assumption for the rest of the summer is an extra light cycle or two at Coronado or Ruisseau Francais, not a return to pre-project timing.
Residents can report a stuck signal, a stranded pedestrian button, or a genuinely unsafe condition directly to Caltrans District 4 Traffic Operations at (510) 286-4444, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by email at [email protected]. When you call, ask to be routed to District 4 Traffic Operations / Signal Systems and give the location, direction, time, and nature of the issue. Field engineers use those specifics to adjust timing.
A resident's rewired week
The temptation is to avoid Highway 1 entirely. That is usually the wrong instinct. The corridor itself moves. The cross streets are what stutter. A more useful set of moves for the rest of paving season:
- Batch north-south errands onto Highway 1 in the middle of the day. The through-lanes are open through the construction zone, and mid-morning to mid-afternoon is when the signal drag matters least because you are not crossing it.
- Push east-west trips off Kelly and Poplar when possible. If you can reach a destination via Main Street south of the project intersections and then cut over locally, do that. The friction is at the signal, not the road.
- Treat 9 p.m. as a soft cutoff for cross-town driving. Once one-way control kicks in for overnight paving, a five-minute hop can become fifteen. If you are heading over the hill after a late dinner in El Granada or Princeton, leave earlier or plan to stay later.
- If you are commuting to the Peninsula, watch Highway 92 separately. SR-92 has been running its own intermittent one-lane closures east of town during daytime construction windows, unrelated to the Highway 1 project. The two do not always coordinate.
- Sign up for the Caltrans project email list. Caltrans strongly encourages residents to sign up for periodic email notifications about this project, and the notice-of-work lead time is usually enough to shift a plan by a day.
What the disruption is actually buying
It is fair to ask what all of this is for, because the answer changes how you feel about waiting through a preset cycle at Coronado. The $46.7M project encompasses upgrading assets such as pavement, guardrails, curbs, and crosswalks that are nearing the end of their service lives, bringing them to ADA standards, and adding Class II bike lanes to both the north- and south-bound sides of the roadway. The finished corridor will be a materially different piece of infrastructure than the one that existed a year ago, with continuous striped bike lanes, upgraded pedestrian crossings, and new curb ramps at the intersections that currently sit on preset timing.
The Coastal Commission piece of this is worth knowing, too. To fulfill the permit requirements outlined by the Coastal Commission, Caltrans will provide public access improvements supporting at least 75 free public parking spaces in the vicinity of Surfers Beach. Whether the final parking distribution satisfies the community that argued for it is a separate conversation, and one the California Coastal Commission has been actively mediating through appeals filed in 2024.
Who is actually in the room
If you want to understand why the city cannot simply order Caltrans to reprogram a signal on your street, the short answer is jurisdiction. Highway 1 is a state route. Half Moon Bay coordinates, it does not command. City staff have been coordinating with the office of San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, Assemblymembers Marc Berman and Diane Papan, and state Sen. Josh Becker to identify short- and long-term solutions to reduce traffic impacts on the community. The Midcoast Community Council, which represents unincorporated Montara, Moss Beach, El Granada, Princeton, and Miramar, is a separate channel for residents north of the city limits.
That layered structure is the reason a well-directed phone call to Caltrans District 4 Traffic Operations often gets a signal timing tweak faster than a well-directed email to City Hall. It is not that the city is uninterested. It is that the levers are physically at Caltrans.
The through-line to summer 2027
The project will continue through the summer of 2027. The base paving that is driving this summer's signal-loop absence should be done by the end of August 2026, at which point detection systems come back online and daytime signal behavior should return to something recognizably normal. The remaining twelve months of the project shift toward finishing work: curb ramps, guardrails, striping, bike-lane completion, and the crosswalk redesigns the city has been pushing for at Kelly and Poplar.
For anyone whose weekly rhythm depends on the corridor, the useful mental model is that this summer is the loud one. The following twelve months are the finishing months. The habits you build now to cross Highway 1 predictably are habits worth keeping through August, and then quietly retiring.
If you are weighing a move on the Coastside, or thinking about how a construction summer affects the way a home lives day to day, Travis Conte & Associates is glad to talk through it. Let's Connect.
