Consultants have siphoned up well over a million dollars over the years on grandiose plans to address traffic in central Manteca and set the stage to transform downtown into a city center worthy of a community on course to top 125,000 residents by 2035.

Each time political hesitation coupled with Manteca’s version of the proverbial question of what comes first, the chicken or the egg, has thwarted establishing a course for the future and following it.

The chicken is central Manteca traffic flow and the egg is a transformation of downtown into a vibrant city center.

Mayor Gary Singh’s goal is to get the city to end the indecisiveness this year.

And he intends to do that by pushing for the adoption of a course of action that ultimately will extend Moffat Boulevard to Yosemite Avenue by using a strip of vacant property behind the businesses on the southern side of the 100 and 200 blocks of West Yosemite.

Given most of the land in question is city owned, there are only three privately owned properties that would be affected. 

The two lane street would have no parking and would run alongside the Tidewater Bikeway.

It would create a four-way intersection at South Main Street.

Moffat  was upgraded 19 years ago and is wide enough to accommodate four lanes of traffic and turn lanes.

Not only would it connect with Spreckels/Industrial Park Drive but also the new alignment with Woodward Avenue that is part of the 120/Bypass/Austin Road interchange Caltrans project now underway to create a robust connection to Atherton Drive and Austin Road. 

As for the downtown properties in the 100 and 200 blocks of Yosemite Avenue, there would be an incentive to create two attractive access points with one facing Yosemite Avenue and the other that would essentially be an extension of Moffat.

The Moffat extension would address the movement on east-west traffic through Central Manteca.

That would then allow Yosemite between Library Park and possibly as far east to Fremont Avenue to be rethought.

It would allow the creation of a trendy dining area and such by widening the sidewalks significantly, planting real shade trees, having little or no parking, and perhaps making it a one way.

Singh has noted there are various options for Yosemite. 

Riverside, for example, placed diagonal parking and gathering plazas for concerts (similar to Tracy) in the center of a downtown street and had traffic lanes shifted to curbside.

Yosemite, by any definition, is the leading candidate for such a makeover.

Yosemite certainly has the lion’s share of buildings that are “downtown-ish” instead of Main Street that looks more like the 1950s instead of reflecting a 1960s stand-alone and/or strip center mentality.

Putting a tourniquet on a major arterial through Main Street through downtown has proven to be widely unpopular and ineffective, hence the removal in 2024 of the last traces of the bulbouts.

Coming up with a downtown bypass for Main Street is beyond problematic and would definitely be expensive.

At the same time, the habit of new community development directors that sign on for short stays in Manteca to suggest building an overpass or underpass of the tracks on Main Street to eliminate traffic backups from passing trains isn’t going to happen.

The suggestions have as many fans as the bulbouts had on Main Street. Either option for a grade separation is prohibitively expensive.

And as city manager short-timer Toby Wells noted in 2021, the only way to reroute Main Street through the central district would lay waste to nearby neighborhoods.

Wells should know. He had a hand in Livermore’s traffic solution to raze big chunks of its central neighborhoods to funnel through traffic away from downtown to help entice a redo of Livermore’s downtown.

Between eminent domain and the cost, not very many are likely to have a stomach for such a strategy in Manteca.

Singh makes the case rerouting east-west through traffic on Yosemite Avenue is the obvious choice.

There are two reasons.

Main Street clearly has to move larger volumes of traffic.

Take a look at Manteca today and the land use pattern the general plan directing growth for the next 20 plus years.

It puts all growth to the north and south until some point in the future where urban reserves to the northeast are developed.

That means no more north-south arterials will be built. 

And while Airport Way and Union Road will clearly see jumps in traffic counts, transforming Cottage Avenue beyond its hybrid status of  being a collector street/arterial would be an all-out nightmare.

The seven years it took the city to secure vacant land needed to simply build the missing link to connect Industrial Park Drive to Spreckels Avenue demonstrates there is no way anyone on the current or future councils would have the stomach to force the sale of land from no less than 50 homeowners along Cottage between Yosemite Avenue and Lathrop Road.

 And that doesn’t include the expensive little detail of needing to widen the Highway 99 overpass.

The other reason is there is no way to have Main Street traffic bypass downtown and to cross the train tracks without going to Cottage Avenue/Spreckels Avenue or wiping out hundreds of houses to create a corridor with the Walnut Avenue railroad crossing.

Yosemite Avenue is a different story. Plus when you look at how it can create another access to the growing southeast portion of the city, it has numerous pluses with minimal impact on property in terms of acquisition.

Singh’s solution would basically prompt traffic going to and from the Spreckels shopping area and Highway 99 to west Manteca beyond Union Road to use Spreckels Avenue to reach Moffat and then head west.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com