Have you noticed the light at San Benancio Road holding green a beat longer for your direction lately, or that the backup through Corral de Tierra in the evening clears faster than it did last spring? And have you also noticed that the Torero Drive on-ramp near Toro Park Elementary is still barricaded most weekday mornings, more than two years after the county first called it a temporary fix?
Highway 68 has run two separate traffic experiments this year. One of them has a project manager, a monitoring schedule, and a public update to a public board. The other one had a stated end date. That date passed in June, roughly six weeks ago, and as of this writing, nobody along the corridor has confirmed in public whether the closures are still in effect for the new school year.
Two fixes, two different clocks
The corridor between Salinas and the Monterey Peninsula carries enough daily traffic that Caltrans and the Transportation Agency for Monterey County (TAMC) have been trying to fix it in pieces for years. A Caltrans District 5 traffic study from November 2022, cited in TAMC's own 2026 funding request, put the corridor's current delay at 6,609 Daily Vehicle Hours of Delay and projected that number would nearly triple to 18,457 by 2045 if nothing changed. That's the number driving everything else on this list.
Two fixes are running right now, and they are not the same fix.
The first is corridor-wide: nine traffic signals between San Benancio Road and Josselyn Canyon Road switched over to Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) on Monday, May 4, 2026, after TAMC's board voted in March 2025 to fund a five-year pilot. These are the lights most Highway 68 commuters hit every day, and the system now reads real-time traffic and adjusts green-light timing on the fly instead of running a fixed schedule.
The second is local and much older: the Toro Park Cut-Through Traffic Pilot Project, which closes Torero Drive at Bravo Court and Portola Drive at Creekside Court to keep commuters from ducking off Highway 68 through Serra Village and Toro Park. That one started July 12, 2024, and was funded through Measure X, the county's local transportation sales tax, the same funding source county voters approved back in 2017 to pay for a first round of Highway 68 signal work.
The signals: cheap, live, and already reporting back
The adaptive signal pilot cost roughly $500,000 over its five-year run, a figure worth sitting with next to the alternative Caltrans has been studying since exploring roundabout concepts for this stretch back in 2019: a nine-intersection rebuild of Highway 68 that would convert several intersections to roundabouts, a plan Caltrans and TAMC have priced at more than $200 million. The adaptive signals are the thing you can actually try this year while the bigger plan works through funding.
TAMC's principal engineer gave the board its first look at results at a May 27, 2026 meeting, and the tone was cautious rather than triumphant. According to Monterey County NOW's coverage of that meeting, he pointed out that spring and fall, while schools are in session, are the best windows for judging whether the system is working, and that the signals had only been live a few weeks.
"Obviously, these are preliminary findings and this is a work in progress."
That caution matters for anyone driving this corridor twice a day. The system that just went live in May is going to keep changing as it learns your commute pattern, not settle into something fixed the way the old signal timing did.
The neighborhood detour that hasn't confirmed its own ending
The Torero Drive and Portola Drive closures tell a different story, because they were never supposed to run this long.
When TAMC first announced the closure in July 2024, the project's manager told the Salinas Valley Tribune that the pilot was designed to go into effect a week or two before school started so the county could observe traffic and adjust. The original window was July 12 to October 1, 2024. It didn't end on schedule. TAMC extended it, then extended it again, and by January 2026, county road-work postings still listed the weekday partial closures at Torero Drive and Portola Drive running from 6 to 9 a.m., set to continue "through June 2026."
June 2026 has now come and gone. If you drive past Toro Park Elementary on a weekday morning, you likely already know whether the barricades are still there. What isn't clear from anything TAMC or Caltrans has published is whether this fall's closure, if it returns, is a new extension, a shift toward something permanent, or the tail end of a pilot finally winding down. The pattern from the past two years, closures reappearing days before the first bell rings, is the best guide residents currently have.
The bigger plan is still years out
While both of these run, the project meant to replace them, the Scenic Route 68 Corridor Improvements Project, is still moving through funding and design. Caltrans is evaluating two build alternatives across nine intersections between Josselyn Canyon Road and San Benancio Road, and the leading option converts all nine to roundabouts, five single-lane, three hybrid, and one two-lane, while adding five new wildlife culverts under the highway.
The first funded phase, laid out in TAMC's 2026 Regional Transportation Improvement Program, targets roundabouts specifically at San Benancio Road, Corral de Tierra, and Laureles Grade, with two of the five wildlife crossings built alongside them. TAMC's maximum share of that phase under the 2026 State Transportation Improvement Program Fund Estimate is $24.345 million, a fraction of the full corridor cost.
Even that first phase is not close. Design and permitting work is expected to run through 2026, right-of-way acquisition began in summer 2025, and construction isn't slated to start before fall 2027 at the earliest. The California Transportation Commission approved the project for future funding consideration in October 2025 and continued that programming when it adopted the 2026 STIP in March. None of that is a construction start date.
Roundabouts have also been the harder sell locally. Drivers along the corridor have on record preferred simply widening Highway 68 over converting intersections to roundabouts, a preference that goes back to the earliest corridor concept studies. That resistance is part of why the county tried something cheaper and faster first. The adaptive signal pilot doesn't touch the road's footprint at all. It only changes what the lights do.
What to watch for as the school year starts
If you commute this corridor, here's what's worth checking before Toro Park and San Benancio schools are back in session:
- Whether the Torero Drive at Bravo Court and Portola Drive at Creekside Court closures reappear, and at what hours, since the pattern the past two years has been closures going up a week or two before the first day of school
- Whether TAMC or Caltrans District 5 posts an update on the pilot's status, rather than letting the June 2026 end date pass without comment, on TAMC's project page or Caltrans District 5's social channels
- Whether your own daily signals, particularly the stretch between San Benancio Road and Josselyn Canyon Road, keep adjusting as the adaptive system gathers more fall commute data, which TAMC's engineer specifically flagged as the next real test
None of this changes what your commute has felt like this year. It explains why one part of it feels like it's settling into something new while the other part still feels like it's waiting for someone to say it's over.
Monterey Coast Realty pays attention to the small mechanics of daily life across the neighborhoods along Highway 68, Corral de Tierra, Toro Park, and San Benancio, not because the road work is a sales pitch, but because knowing how a place actually runs is part of knowing it at all. If there's a corner of the corridor you'd like us to keep tracking, Contact Us.
