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Binu Abraham is the director of the San Benito Council of Governments (COG), the county’s lead transportation agency. On May 1, she spoke with BenitoLink about her office’s most ambitious undertaking: the long-awaited improvement of Hwy 25.
BenitoLink: What is the biggest transportation challenge in San Benito County?
Binu Abraham: If I had to name just one, I think the biggest challenge is managing the county’s growth and having the infrastructure, especially the transportation infrastructure, to be able to handle that growth. And that’s a particular challenge right now you find worldwide because of population growth and limited funding options.
But what is unique about San Benito County is its location, how close it is to the economic center of the world, the Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay Area. The relative affordability of our county creates growth pressures that are sometimes at odds with the rich soil here and preserving our agricultural heritage. These are really competing priorities. On one side, you have the agriculture, the fertile soil, the prime aglands, but you are also so close to Silicon Valley. So, how do you manage these two? How can transportation help you get the quality of life that you want as a person, as a family, and as a community? That’s the main transportation challenge.
BenitoLink: How does the Hwy 25 project fit into this?
Abraham: Highway 25 is not just about traffic. It’s the backbone of the community. It’s about safety, jobs, the economy, and opportunities that support high quality of life.
San Benito County has the third highest concentration of super commuters in California—people who travel 90 minutes one way, or three hours round trip on a daily basis. For a small-population county like ours, that means a majority of our residents are commuting out for work, education, or medical care. And they’re on Hwy 25.
That’s one priority. But it competes with another: slow-moving ag vehicles and farmworkers who also rely on the road. They have different needs. Think about freight. Let’s say you’re moving lettuce straight from the field. You don’t want to be in congestion for two hours and end up with wilted lettuce that cuts into your profit. You want it to be off and shipped all over the world as fast as you possibly can.
Farmers need to ship their produce and get their fields ready for the next season; commuters need to get to their jobs; and we need to prioritize both.
BenitoLink: So, in a way, Hwy 25 is what connects both sides in tension: the farmworkers and the commuters to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area?
Abraham: Yes. And there’s another aspect people often don’t think about: evacuation and emergency preparedness. We live in an earthquake-prone area.
One of my concerns is that if something like what happened in L.A.—maybe not a fire, but an earthquake or any natural disaster—were to happen here, how can we safely and efficiently move people to safer places? It’s not a risk you think of every day, but it should be part of the purpose of state highways and major roads—helping us get out of the county when it matters most.
BenitoLink: Improving Hwy 25 has been on the minds of residents for a while, what’s the project’s status?
Abraham: Right now, we are in the environmental phase. We started the environmental impact report/environmental assessment in December. If everything goes according to the plan established in November 2024 and there are no roadblocks, we will have a draft environmental impact report by the end of 2026. And then we would have the final report by 2027. It then needs to go for public review for people to respond to it, address the concerns, and maybe revisit some of the things that we are looking into.
Once you have that approved and finalized, you go into design. So, according to the current timeline established in December 2024, if everything goes smoothly the design work would start in 2027, and that takes about two years. So, I would expect it to be completed by 2029. That’s when you know really where the road will be and how much it is going to cost. If things stay on schedule, then in 2030 we can start acquisition and construction.
BenitoLink: Of the six alternatives COG is considering, which include such options as adding a bus lane, expanding by two car lanes, or even introducing a train, would you say that widening the highway is the most likely outcome?
Abraham: Widening the 25 is the outcome that we want. It’s definitely what most people in this county are looking forward to. How we widen it is the question. It could be four lanes, it could be three lanes, it could be two lanes.
The ultimate goal is that we need a safer corridor with more travel options. We definitely need more than what we have now, because our challenge is that we have ag or farm vehicles on the road wanting to access the farms, and we have commuters who need to get somewhere really fast.
BenitoLink: There are plenty of studies showing that widening roads ultimately leads to more traffic and higher carbon dioxide emissions, something the state of California and much of the world are actively trying to reduce. Given that, why would it still be a good idea to widen Hwy 25?
Abraham: That touches on Senate Bill 743. In the context of the California Environmental Quality Act [CEQA], whenever you have a project like Hwy 25, you have to do an environmental analysis. The methodology now focuses on vehicle miles traveled.
Prior to SB 743, [CEQA] just looked at how many people are travelling on the road. If there was a lot of congestion, the response was, “We need to widen it.”
But when SB 743 passed in 2013, the state said, “Well we understand it’s an inconvenience for the drivers when there is a lot of congestion, but we cannot keep widening roads because there is no end to it.” You widen the road, more people start using it and it’s just a cycle. So instead of measuring how many people are on the road, the state shifted to measuring how far people are traveling.
The idea behind that was to encourage infill growth, areas where you can walk, bike, and use public transit, and that will help prevent a lot more people from being in the car, especially driving alone. But that’s not what happens in San Benito County.
BenitoLink: Why not?
Abraham: The premise of SB 743 assumes that you’re in an infill area. That there are going to be all those other options of transportation, like biking, scooters, buses, or even a train. So you don’t need to drive your car. That does not exist in rural communities.
The other part is that infill development assumes that there is a mixed-use land use where there are jobs, retail, and coffee shops and people hanging out all within a certain walkable distance. If you just need to go five blocks and have a coffee shop and two blocks to your dry cleaner and another three blocks to your office, you can do all this without taking your car.
But that assumption differs from how a rural county like San Benito is built. First, we don’t have a diversity of jobs, so people have to commute. And if the people here want to have a better quality of life, you are not going to prevent them from having that. That’s the whole point of transportation. Second, we have hundreds and hundreds of acres of farmland. You’re not going to say, “Oh, I’m going to want to have a coffee. Let me just walk 500 acres.” That’s not going to happen.
So, the reason why SB 743 is the issue that stops us from widening Hwy 25 is that it makes it much more expensive.
BenitoLink: How?
Abraham: It makes it more expensive because now you have this huge mitigation cost that’s coming from the emissions from all these people traveling from here to all the other destinations—that’s the vehicle miles traveled—and now we have to mitigate for that impact. That’s going to increase the cost of the project. And that is something that we are discussing with the state legislators and our speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas, who is from this community and has been a huge advocate for us.
We’re pushing for the state to recognize the difference between urban and rural areas. Context matters. The same rules shouldn’t apply universally, and that’s something we’re working hard to change.
BenitoLink: So let’s say everything goes according to plan and the road is widened, traffic congestion stops for a while. But then it comes back again. How do we break this cycle?
Abraham: As much as I’ve said that transit is not working well enough now, the only way to break that cycle is to invest in more transit. So that eventually you come to a point where it becomes a robust, reliable and available way of transportation and people will shift from their cars onto this. We need to provide reliability. People need to know that when they’re going out, they can rely on transit to safely bring them back.
We need to have a robust network, but this doesn’t happen overnight. You need to slowly build your network, the number of buses and the service you are providing. And that takes a long time. It also takes a long time for people to change their behavior.
BenitoLink: Landowners around Hwy 25 have expressed concerns about how the project might affect their land. How is COG addressing those concerns?
Abraham: The COG board is in active conversation with them. We’re trying to understand the full range of local concerns, and find the right path forward that will address all the concerns. It takes time. A big project like this requires a big partnership. You have to involve Caltrans. You have to involve all the communities—the business community, the commuters, as well as the ag community.
So what the COG board is doing is trying to understand all the different priorities and finding a balance in what we can deliver. At the same time, we have to honor the promise made to voters when the county passed the tax measure that’s helping fund this project. That was a promise the county made that we would do something on Hwy 25.
So we have competing priorities and we’re finding a balance. It’s going to take time. The good thing is that, after years and years of conversation, we are now finally at a point where we are changing plans into action.
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