Traffic is a favorite topic of discussion in Sebastopol. Transplants from the Bay Area or New York sometimes laugh when Sebastopolians complain about traffic. But no one is laughing this week because the traffic in downtown Sebastopol (and all the way up Hwy. 116 to the north end of town) has been insane.
Yesterday, the Sebastopol Times’ office mate at Sebastopol Blue complained that traffic on his commute into Sebastopol on Hwy. 12 from Santa Rosa was backed up all the way to before Fulton Road. This morning, a reader who lives in a house that faces Gravenstein Highway wrote the Sebastopol Times asking what was happening.
“The traffic flowing in from the north on 116 was a constant juggernaut and all afternoon, not just during the after-school hours,” she wrote.
We called around to the usual suspects—the mayor, the chief of police, and Supervisor Lynda Hopkins—asking what was up. We hit gold with the latter.
“I can help answer that question,” Hopkins wrote. “It’s the full-depth reclamation taking place on Occidental Road, which is currently closed to through traffic (and only open to residents, businesses, or customers accessing those businesses). That means that one of the main four east/west arterials connecting West County to 101 is essentially shut down, forcing folks to take alternate routes. Because Highway 12 is the closest arterial to Occidental, we are seeing quite a bit of traffic backup on 12 and through downtown Sebastopol.”
Basically, the folks that usually take Occidental Road as a way of avoiding downtown Sebastopol no longer have that option, at least temporarily, and so they’re driving through town.
Speaking of the Occidental repair, Hopkins said, “It’s a multimillion-dollar repaving project that will essentially create an entirely new road. It’s not just an asphalt overlay. A full depth reclamation basically chews up the existing road, creates a brand new road base, and then adds an overlay on top.”
The project began on Wednesday, Aug. 19, and is set to conclude on Sept. 3, though a Facebook Post from Sonoma County Public Infrastructure warns, “Construction schedules can shift based on progress and field conditions, and we’ll share updates if that changes.”
The project is a part of the 2026-2027 Pavement Preservation Program, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors on June 3, 2025. Here are two maps of the planned repairs. The top map is countywide; the bottom is a detail of the planned work in West County.
Interestingly, some of the money paying for the Occidental repairs comes from a special fund set aside for roads that are frequently used by gravel trucks, which are heavy and especially hard on local roads.
“Included in the plan is $2 million for a countywide crack seal program and $800,000 of one-time Aggregate Road Mitigation (ARM) funds for paving of Occidental Road. The ARM funds are available for road maintenance and capital improvements on the aggregate haul routes, the County’s Metropolitan Transportation System roads and other arterial and collector roads generally used by the aggregate haulers.”
The good news for Sebastopol is that this level of traffic is not a permanent state of affairs. The bad news is things will be moving slow for the next week or so. Here’s a clip from this morning’s drive in on the Gravenstein Highway, passing the Community Church of Sebastopol.
Is there a schedule showing which parts of Occidental Rd are closed or are they doing the entire road from at the same time.