Lets not repeat history!

In May 2026, KLD provided the Friends of Tarpy Flats with a detailed Wildfire Evacuation Plan for the Tarpy Flats area (which can be viewed in its entirety here). 

Olmsted Road and Highway 68 is one of the nine intersections in the Scenic Route 68 project (Josselyn Canyon through San Benancio). A Highway 68 / Olmsted roundabout has been on TAMC’s short-list for years, to be coordinated with the airport master plan. The airport is separately building a roundabout at Olmsted and Garden, for the new terminal—not a substitute for the Highway 68 node. 

Monterey Regional Airport served 622,543 passengers in 2024 and a record 659,867 in 2025. Almost all landside access funnels to Olmsted / 68. That traffic is growing independently of any Tarpy Flats housing. 

The additional proposed housing adds +6,000 two-way daily vehicles assigned to the Olmsted / 68 influence area. That is a conservative planning assignment: not every housing trip would use that intersection, but airport, cut-through, and commute traffic already do, and the user specified the corridor, not a trip-distribution model. Daily volume after increment:

• Base (TAMC existing): 22,300 average daily trips
• Plus 6,000: 28,300 average daily trips
• Versus a 16,000 “design” figure
• Volume to Capacity increases to 1.8 (from 1.46) (anything over 1 exceeds capacity)

That is not a small step. It is another 27% on a road already 46% over its LOS E daily capacity. 

Analysis during Peak hour: Residential and mixed suburban trip patterns typically put 8–10% of daily trips in the peak hour. For our analysis, we will assume 9%:

• Added peak-hour volume: about 540 vehicles per hour (two-way)
• Directional split 60/40 in the commute peak: about 325 veh/h on the heavy approach, 215 on the reverse

On a signalized two-lane highway, peak-hour service is governed by green time at the signals, not by midblock Average Annual Daily Traffic. The corridor already fails because those greens are too short for the queues that exist. Adding ~300+ vehicles in the peak direction at the airport intersection is the difference between “miss one cycle” and “miss several,” especially when airport peaks overlap the commute (typical at regional airports with morning departures and evening arrivals).

Daily delay order of magnitude. Caltrans’ current 6,609 Daily vehicle hours of travel (DVHT) is for the nine-intersection corridor, not Olmsted alone. Delay rises faster than volume once Volume/capacity is already above 1.0. A linear 27% volume increase would be a lower bound. A more realistic planning range, given queues that already spill through multiple cycles, is roughly 30–50% more daily delay on the west end of the corridor if nothing else changes—on the order of 2,000–3,300 extra vehicle-hours per day, before 2045 growth. That is an estimate, not a calibrated model. The official 2045 triple-delay forecast does not include a discrete +6,000 at Olmsted.

4. What that looks like at the intersection of Highway 68 at Olmsted is the merge of:

• Peninsula–Salinas commute 
• Airport arrivals and departures 
• Local access to Monterra, Oak Tree Views, Ryan Ranch / Ragsdale, and any Tarpy Flats development 
• Emergency vehicles for the airport and the High Fire Hazard Severity Zone south of 68

At LOS F, extra cars do not “spread out through the day.” They lengthen the peak and the shoulder. Practical effects of +6,000 ADT:

• Longer westbound morning queues through the airport frontage 
• Harder left turns and side-street entry from Olmsted (the movement housing and airport traffic both need) 
• More cycle failures at 68 / 218 (Canyon Del Rey), which is the next valve east 
• Cut-through pressure onto neighborhood streets when 68 is stopped—already a documented problem farther east (Portola / Toro Park) 
• Worse reliability than average delay: the “buffer time” commuters already add on 68 gets larger

Adaptive signals and a future 68 / Olmsted roundabout can recover some seconds. They do not create a second outbound lane. TAMC has already said signal timing cannot substitute for capacity. 

 Wildfire overlay (why daily traffic is an evacuation input) KLD’s evacuation finding and this daily increment are the same network under two loading patterns.

Paradise showed that a road network can be “planned” for staged evacuation and still fail when the whole community leaves at once and fire closes exits. Pre-fire Paradise estimates were five to eight hours to empty the town; the fire arrived in a fraction of that. Roads jammed in about an hour. NIST documented burnovers, abandoned cars, and temporary refuge areas because leaving was no longer possible. 

Translating the Paradise experience to that on Olmsted / 68:

• The daily +6,000 does not sit in a parking lot until a fire starts. It means more residents, workers, and airport users who would all need that intersection in the same two-hour window KLD already says is too short. 
• If the corridor is already queued 20 minutes on a normal Tuesday morning, a red-flag evacuation starts from a worse initial condition than KLD’s “empty network” mental model. 
• Airport traffic does not disappear in a wildfire. Passengers, employees, and rental cars are additional competing demand, plus incoming emergency apparatus. 
• Paradise’s Skyway problem was few ways out. Tarpy Flats’ problem, as framed by KLD, is one way out at this node. Adding daily volume does not add an exit.

The comparison is structural, not a claim that Tarpy Flats is the same size as Paradise (it is not). It is that leftover vehicles after a two-hour clearance are the population that, in 2018, sat in smoke.

Findings

• The corridor is already over its daily capacity. Official TAMC/Caltrans figures put SR 68 at Olmsted at about 22,300 ADT on a 15,300 LOS E capacity. LOS F is the existing condition, not a future risk. 
• +6,000 daily vehicles raises the segment to about 28,300 ADT (V/C ≈ 1.85). That is a 27% load increase on a facility that is already 46% above capacity.
• The operational hit is at the intersection, in the peak and the fire pulse. Expect on the order of 540 added peak-hour vehicles, heavily directional, competing with airport peaks. Delay will rise faster than volume.
• Airport growth is already using the same residual capacity. 660,000 annual passengers in 2025 is an independent upward trend. Housing trips and airport trips are not separate systems at Olmsted. 
• Planned mitigations (adaptive signals, possible 68 / Olmsted roundabout, airport Garden/Olmsted roundabout) improve control, not lane count. They can shrink delay per vehicle. They cannot absorb a 6,000-vehicle daily increment and a mass evacuation at the same time.
• For wildfire, +6,000 daily cars is +6,000 more vehicles that may need the choke point in the same 2-hour-10-minute window KLD already flags as leaving thousands behind. Paradise is the proof that leftover demand in a fast fire is not theoretical.

Comparing a potential wildfire at Tarpy Flats to the Paradise Camp Fire:

The KLD Tarpy Flats study is a modeled clearance-time estimate. Paradise is a documented catastrophe. The useful comparison is not population size—it is what happens when fire arrives faster than the road network can empty.

KLD (Tarpy Flats), as presented by Save Tarpy Flats: under current density it would take about 2 hours 10 minutes to get 90% of people out, leaving roughly 1,000 cars / 2,000 people still in the area. With the proposed housing, the same window could leave 6,000+ vehicles / about 12,000 people behind. Almost all of that traffic is forced through one intersection: Olmsted Road and Highway 68. 

Paradise (Camp Fire, Nov. 8, 2018): a town of about 27,000, plus nearby ridge communities, tried to move about 40,000 people after a fire that started around 6:15 a.m. and was spotting into Paradise by about 8:00 a.m. Eighty-five people died. More than 18,000 structures were destroyed. NIST later reconstructed the evacuation in detail. Paradise officials had already estimated, before the fire, that emptying the whole town would take about eight hours under ordinary conditions and more than five hours even if Skyway were immediately flipped to one-way outbound. They thought the roads could handle only about four evacuation zones in two hours—less than a quarter of the population. The fire did not wait that long. The shared problem: time versus choke points.

In Paradise, roads that normally took about 25 minutes took several hours if they were passable at all. The 16-mile run toward Chico became a roughly five-hour crawl. By mid-morning, fire was blocking northern and southern routes at the same time. Abandoned and burning cars made the jams worse. Firefighters used heavy equipment to shove vehicles aside. People left cars and ran. Temporary refuge areas were improvised in parking lots because leaving was no longer possible. That is the practical meaning of KLD’s “people still trapped after 2 hours 10 minutes.” In Paradise, that leftover population was not a spreadsheet remainder. It was people sitting in smoke with fire on both sides of the road.

Where the cases are similar:

• • Egress is thinner than the population that would use it. Paradise sat on volcanic ridges with dead-end streets feeding a handful of downhill arteries. Tarpy Flats, in the site’s telling, funnels existing neighborhoods plus any new units through one already congested airport-adjacent intersection.

• Clearance time is longer than a fast fire’s lead time. Camp Fire gave Paradise on the order of minutes to a couple of hours, not the five to eight hours planners had assumed. KLD’s 2-hour-10-minute 90% figure is already in the same range as the window Paradise did not have.

• Adding demand without adding exits multiplies the leftover population. KLD’s jump from ~1,000 leftover cars to 6,000+ is the same logic Paradise officials later stated plainly: there was no realistic plan to evacuate everyone at once, and building enough extra lanes beforehand had never been politically or financially treated as necessary. 

• Fire does not wait in an orderly queue. NIST documented 19 or more burnovers, road closures from flames, trees, and downed lines, and more than 230 abandoned vehicles on major exits—about 60% of them burned. A traffic model that treats the network as intact will understate how bad a real fire day is. 

The comparison between Tarpy Flats and Paradise is about corridor capacity. Paradise showed that a community can have an evacuation plan and still lose the race to evacuate because:

• almost everyone has to leave at once,
• few roads serve as exits,
• those roads clog within an hour, and
• the fire then closes the roads that are left.

KLD’s finding is that Tarpy Flats already needs more than two hours to clear most people through one intersection, and that proposed density would leave thousands still in the corridor in that same period. Paradise is the real-world illustration of why that leftover population is the part that matters: in 2018, people still on the road when the fire arrived were the ones burned over, forced into parking-lot refuges, or found in their cars.  The overlap is structure: limited exits + simultaneous demand + a fire that moves in tens of minutes, not hours. That is the pattern Paradise lived and the pattern the Tarpy Flats site is using KLD to warn about.

Attend Monterey County Development meetings

Attend Monterey County and City Meetings to voice your opposition. Soon, we will post a notification of the next Monterey County meeting to officially vote on the inclusion of the Tarpy Flats development in the RHNA plan.

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