Local News Matters, June 2026
Some guy at the end of the bar swears it’s gotten hotter out by the Narrows since they widened U.S. Highway 101. Normally you let that kind of thing slide, somewhere between the fish that got away and the cousin who almost went pro. Not this time. He’s right.
He’s talking about the Marin-Sonoma Narrows — the long-bottlenecked run of Highway 101 that Caltrans spent more than a decade widening through central Sonoma County. The ground within a half mile of the new lanes ran almost 4 degrees hotter the year after Caltrans finished the first stretch — the biggest jump of any of 11 Northern California freeway projects that researchers at UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State and Northeastern University checked by satellite. Here’s the deal.
