The Water Was Deeper than I Expected

Fences blocking previous Jennings Avenue crossing

In recent posts, I mentioned being more fully occupied in the last few weeks than I’d planned.   Today, I’ll color in the picture.  It’s a story of urbanist advocacy.

Sometime in the past year, I became a member of Friends of SMART, a citizens group founded to wave the flag for the voter-approved SMART commuter rail system, to encourage SMART to live up to the promises made to the voters, and to advocate for land-use practices that will help make SMART transformational.

Although no one gave me the rules in advance, it seems that attendance at three consecutive Friends of SMART (FoS) makes one a lifetime member.  It was a standard I met sometime last year while coordinating on how to retain the second Petaluma SMART station at Corona Road rather than having it hijacked to less suitable site.

I don’t mind being a lifetime member of FoS.  They’re passionate folks whose beliefs are largely the same as mine.  I enjoy hanging out with people like them.

Thus, when the de facto but untitled vice president of FoS leaned across the table at the February Board meeting and asked for me to submit written testimony for an approaching hearing on a pedestrian and bicycle issue, I readily agreed.

I should have asked a few questions.

The subject of the hearing was the proposed Jennings Avenue at-grade crossing in Santa Rosa.  For a hundred years, residents of the neighborhood crossed the railroad tracks at Jennings Avenue, some heading westward to schools, some heading eastward toward shopping and entertainment, some only visiting friends.  And there have been many crossings in that century.  During a recent 8-hour period, the City of Santa Rosa counted more than a hundred pedestrians and bicyclists crossing the tracks.

But it seems that the crossing had never been officially permitted, so the pedestrians and bicyclists were trespassers.  As the day approached when SMART would begin testing cars on the tracks, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) directed that the crossing be fenced.

Recognizing that the crossing was an essential connection within the neighborhood and an integral element of the Santa Rosa Bicycle Master Plan, the City began a search for a crossing that the CPUC would approve.  The City settled on two alternatives, a separated grade crossing and a gate-protected at-grade crossing.  And they found an agency willing to fund the $8 million tab for the separated grade crossing.

But, faced with a strong neighborhood preference for the at-grade alternative, fueled by concerns the separate grade alternative, rising twenty feet over the tracks, would hold hidden dangers for children and be impassible for the disabled even if the ADA standards were met, the City turned down the money and applied to the CPUC for the gate-protected at-grade crossing.

The division of the CPUC responsible for crossing safety objected strongly and the battle was on, a battle that I still find a bit silly, with adults playing legal games while children must walk a half-mile out of their way to reach their schools.  But those are the rules.

The first skirmish was a public participation hearing near the crossing.  The neighborhood scored points with a large turnout and unanimous support for the at-grade crossing.  But battles aren’t won at the first skirmish, so the parties girded for the next step, an evidentiary hearing in San Francisco earlier this week.

It was written testimony for this hearing that the FoS vice-president wanted from me.  I readily agreed because I play with words on the subject of urbanism every week.  How hard could written testimony be?

I dashed off a two-page letter, summarizing my knowledge of the Jennings Avenue crossing and playing it off my background knowledge of walkability and bikeability.  I sent off the letter for review.

What came back was my first wakeup call.  Prose wasn’t acceptable.  The format had to be in the form of a dialogue, with questions posed and responses made.  Admittedly, I sometimes have internal dialogues while thinking through the logic of a future post, but committing a dialogue to my keyboard was more difficult.  Especially when the direction was to rely on specific facts, not general knowledge, and to provide citations wherever possible.

After multiple drafts and repeated feedback, I was able to hammer out six pages of direct testimony, saw that it had been submitted to the administrative law judge overseeing the process, and assumed I was done.

I was again wrong.  As testimony from other parties also arrived, I was asked to prepare rebuttal testimony.  Of course, I agreed.  And then I was asked to reference the testimony of two other supporters of the at-grade crossing in the rebuttal to bring their insights into the official record.  After numerous drafts and a couple of late nights, my rebuttal testimony was complete and shipped to the judge.  Finally, I was done.

But I wasn’t.  Now I learned that I had to appear at the hearing in San Francisco to be cross-examined.

And so I found myself earlier this week sitting in a witness chair, under oath, inside a CPUC hearing room in San Francisco, being questioned by the CPUC attorney.

It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but the errors I’d made in my testimony soon became evident.

I won’t name him, but a frequent reader and correspondent, who will recognize himself, noted in a recent email that Japanese children have learned to safely navigate at-grade crossings, a lesson that should be transferrable across the Pacific.  Although I haven’t visited Japan, what he said was consistent with my understanding, plus I knew my correspondent was a regular traveler to Japan, so I included the thought in my testimony.  I shouldn’t have.

To bring my expertise into question, the CPUC attorney homed in on the Japanese comment and asked me a series of questions about nature of the Japanese railroad system, including the extent to which passengers and freight share tracks.  To each question, I had to admit ignorance.  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have mentioned Japan.  A lesson for next time.

The attorney next turned to the beach access at-grade rail crossings in San Clemente, which have been quite successful and might be seen as a precedent for Jennings Avenue.  He queried me about whether the California Coastal Commission, in their mandated role of advocating for universal beach access, might have had an effect on the San Clemente decisions, making those crossings less of a precedent.  It was an interesting argument, but I had no basis to comment upon it, so again had to retreat.

I didn’t spend my entire time in the witness chair playing rope-a-dope, managing to make a couple of points about which I felt good.  Nor did I feel battered by the process.  But I could have done better.

I don’t regret agreeing to participate in the process.  It was good to collaborate with folks who aren’t spending their senior years in rocking chairs but are aggressively advocating for the public good, even though none live near Jennings Avenue.

And it was fun to watch another FoS member rigorously develop an argument that undermined the key CPUC contention that separated grade crossings are inherently safer than at-grade crossings.  His argument, which was buttressed by numerous examples, was that, when people are fearful of separated grade crossings, they use openings in the fences, which always seem to appear, to cross at grade without crossing protections.  As these last are more dangerous, the overall safety of separated grade crossings is diminished.

Ultimately, the argument was that separated grade crossings as isolated elements are inherently safe, but when components of a complete system, it’s not clear that they’re safer than at-grade crossings.  It was an insightful argument, well assembled.

Is my involvement completed with this effort?  Perhaps, but I’m not sure.  There may still be a hearing in front of the entire CPUC Board.  Meanwhile, I’ve learned lessons that I can apply next time.

And, at least for the next few days, my schedule has a little more breathing room in it.

 When I next write, I’ll tell of a woman I recently met who is doing something marvelous with bicycles and senior citizens.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Watching a Towering Surf of Common Sense Crash Against an Adamantine Cliff of Codes and Regulations

Crossing location

A few days ago, I wrote about an upcoming hearing on a proposed at-grade crossing in Santa Rosa.

The proposed crossing would confirm and reopen an existing pedestrian/bicycle connection between the two halves of Jennings Avenue, passing over railroad tracks that were recently returned to use.  It was a crossing that, although never official, had long served as a route between homes, businesses, and schools on both sides of the track.

During the many years that the tracks were unused, no one had taken notice of the crossing.  But with freight service and now SMART trains returning to the tracks, the crossing had become a concern for the California Public Utility Commission.  After considering options, including the possibility of an $8.2 million separated grade bridge, the City of Santa Rosa applied for approval of an at-grade crossing.

In the earlier post, I advocated for the at-grade crossing.  I also expressed concern that the rule-bound rigidity of the process was so time-consuming that many of the students who could have used the crossing to reach elementary school will have driver’s licenses before a decision is rendered.

I attended the hearing two evening ago.  Nothing in the process caused me to change either earlier assessment.  But I nonetheless came away feeling optimistic about people and about urbanism.

I felt energized because I watched a neighborhood of modest means and little influence rally together in large numbers and with enthusiasm to argue for an amenity that they found essential to the well-being of their lives.  And also because the amenity that the neighborhood wanted was walkable urbanism.  It was a naturally occurring, unselfconscious advocacy for a more walkable urban world.  And that makes me happy.

On my way to the hearing, I stopped by the location of the proposed crossing.  The sun and fence didn’t allow a good photo of the tracks, but the signage was clear enough to give a mirthless chuckle.

Detour sign

The City, responding to the closure by the PUC, suggested a walk-around of 0.6 miles and 15 to 20 minutes to replace the crossing, a length of walk that usually deters walking.  And that’s without noting that a segment of the recommended walk would be along a five-lane arterial without a sidewalk, for which the walking route is a narrow sliver of bare dirt behind a curb and perched above a steep slope declining to a creekbed.

Give a moment to ponder that.  The PUC is suggesting that students on their way to elementary school walk on a two-foot dirt path between quickly moving cars and sometimes quickly moving water.  And they make that suggestion for the sake of public safety.

It was with that absurdity still vibrating in my head that I arrived at the hearing.

The evening opened with the City summarizing the steps to date, the different alternatives that were considered, the environmental process that was followed, and the application to the Public Utility Commission for the at-grade crossing.  The location of the elementary school west of the tracks and the growing number of elementary school students living east of the tracks were also noted.  It was an unexciting, but factual and necessary, summary.

An engineer for the Safety and Enforcement Division of the PUC then made what was the most unhelpful presentation of the evening.  He noted that the PUC policy is to reduce the number of at-grade crossings, that many more deaths occur at at-grade crossings than at separated grade crossings, and that the City should have pursued the $8.2 million separated grade crossing when the funds might have been available.

It was a presentation which left a wealth of unanswered questions.  Would people actually use the separated grade crossing or would they revert to cars?  Would students cut the fences and continue crossing at grade, without the safety measures?  How would the City justify plopping an $8.2 million dollar concrete structure into the middle of a residential neighborhood, a physical juxtaposition that would much like plopping a tyrannosaurus rex into a petting zoo?  Were the fatality totals adjusted for the deaths that were ruled suicides?

It was a perfect example of a solution that looked at the problem through a pinhole rather in its entirety, which is the antithesis of good urbanism.  Luckily, the neighborhood effectively destroyed most of his arguments as the evening continued.

Acknowledgement: Due to my poor stenography skills, the following “quotes” are imprecise.  I’ve assuredly missed words and probably even combined the sentiments of multiple speakers.  But, regardless of attribution, all of the points below were made during the public comments, which began with City representatives and elected officials, and then continued with neighborhood residents.

“The crossing, although never approved, has been in use since the late 19th century, predating cars.  And not one single fatality has been experienced in that century plus.”

“Speaking as a wheelchair user, I could never climb the separated grade crossing and would be isolated unless an at-grade crossing is provided.”

“As a parent, I’d never let my child use the separated grade crossing because they couldn’t see around the corners and wouldn’t know what dangers might be waiting for them.”

“If we want to reduce greenhouse gases, we must provide useful walkable solutions.”

“As a researcher on the issues of a post-carbon world, we need to encourage pedestrians by providing facilities that meet their needs.”

“I’m now 46 years old, but remember being a student at this school and crossing the tracks with friends on a Saturday afternoon to see movies.”

“Listening to the speakers this evening, we’re hearing common sense swamping rules.”

“If we wish to encourage seniors to give up driving when they’re no longer safe behind the wheel, we must provide walkable alternatives.”

“The at-grade crossing has been in multiple City of Santa Rosa plans, from the General Plan down, for many years.”

“The concern with the railroad tracks is 32 trains per day.  But nearby Dutton Avenue, which students also cross while walking to school, has 32 cars every 110 seconds during morning peak.  And the cars will be traveling faster than the trains.  Are we even asking the right question?”

While none of the speakers may have been overly eloquent, the overall voice of the neighborhood was highly eloquent.

The remaining question is whether that eloquent voice will be heard.  After the now completed hearing, which was targeted toward collecting public comments, a more rigorous evidentiary hearing, complete with testimony and cross-examination, will be held in San Francisco in mid-April.  PUC staff will then draft an order for consideration by the full Commission during the summer.  Overall it seems a welter of decision-making in which the desires of the neighborhood might be lost.

Having little prior experience with the PUC process, I don’t know what to expect as a final result, but hope that a neighborhood arguing with a unified voice for an urbanist solution won’t be lost to a blind reliance on rules that shouldn’t apply to a changing world.

I’ll keep you advised.

I recently glanced at my notes from the recent StrongTowns/Urban3 visit to the North Bay.  I spotted a quote from Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns that I’d written down, but somehow still not really heard.  Coming across it again, it spoke to me in a whole new way, with deep implications about urbanism.  I’ll ruminate in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)