North Bay Great Streets: Petaluma and Cotati

I recently assigned myself a holiday task, searching the North Bay for great streets using the great streets criteria set forth by the Project for Public Places.  (If you haven’t read the original PPS article, I recommend it.)

The ten PPS criteria are:

·         Attractions and destinations

·         Identity and image

·         Active edge uses

·         Amenities

·         Management

·         Seasonal strategies

·         Diverse user groups

·         Traffic, transit and the pedestrian

·         Blending of uses and modes

·         Neighborhood preservation

With those criteria in mind, and with my additional standard that any street segment must be at least four blocks in length to be considered a great street, I began to plan outings through the North Bay.

I started simply, looking at my own community of Petaluma with the new perspective provided by PPS and also wandering downtown Cotati.

Petaluma: Two concepts, bypasses and jaywalking, became central to my observations in Petaluma and Cotati and will likely also apply to many other North Bay cities.

I‘ve long been puzzled by the conundrum of how to manage the evolution of communities that grew up nurtured by regional roadways.  At some point, the traffic volume grows too great to be accommodated in the downtown.  A bypass is the most common solution, but a bypass can undermine a commercial district that has been sustained by large volumes of traffic passing by its front doors.

And if stores close, the local residents who shopped at those stores are forced to find other shops, many of which wouldn’t be in the downtown.  The long-established main street can quickly wither, depriving the community of a needed element.

I’m convinced that an effective urbanism policy can help sustain a downtown after a bypass, but land-use policy is rarely a component of a bypass decision, which instead usually focuses on traffic counts and funding availability.

In Petaluma, the bypass decision was made years ago, with 101 removing regional traffic from Petaluma Boulevard.  Although it’s intriguing to ponder how Petaluma and the North Bay would be different if the main north-south traffic continued to flow through downtown Petaluma, I believe the decision was wise.

But the long-ago role of Petaluma Boulevard as a regional traffic route continues to affect the community.  The street pattern forces many local trips to make use of Petaluma Boulevard.  For many trips, there is no reasonable alternative.

Which brings me to my second concept, jaywalking.  I’m not going to encourage jaywalking.  In my personal rambles, I’m content to walk a couple of hundred feet out of my direct path to avoid jaywalking.  But I suspect that any street, to be great, must be a street where jaywalking, with a bit of caution, can be safely accomplished.   And I think that this idea is consistent with what PPS intends when they write of a balance of transportation options.

But jaywalking on Petaluma Boulevard isn’t a reasonable option, even with caution.  The traffic volumes are too great and the average speed too high.  For that reason, I tried to convince myself that Kentucky Street, parallel to Petaluma Boulevard and one block further from the Petaluma River, was the nearest thing Petaluma had to a great street.

There was much to recommend Kentucky.  It’s the street most frequently used for street fairs.  It has a number of gracefully aging buildings.  It’s the street where my wife and I are most likely to amble in an evening, compared to Petaluma Boulevard where we’re more likely to be destination-driven.  It’s the street where I’m more likely to bump into folks I know.  The jaywalking is easy.  And even the one unfortunate gap in the heart of Kentucky Street, the A Street parking lot, gives a glimpse of the historic A Street neighborhood a block away.

I was prepared to anoint Kentucky as Petaluma’s great street until I took another walk along it.  The segment of Kentucky that I enjoy is only two blocks long, from B Street to E. Washington Street.  Further north, the street features a Bank of America parking lot and an oddly awkward transition between a hotel and a stretch of historical homes.  To the south, where Kentucky has become Fourth Street but is the same street, is a hardware store that is beloved locally but doesn’t offer much of an amenity to Fourth Street and a strip mall, auto parts store, and bank, all of which are behind parking lots.

As much as I like the central two blocks of Kentucky, the remainder of the four-block segment undermines its candidacy as a great street.  I was forced to return my vote to the segment of Petaluma Boulevard from E. Washington Street to D Street. 

Not that Petaluma Boulevard is a bad candidate.  Once one acknowledges the heavy traffic and the dampening effect on streetlife, there is much to like about Petaluma Boulevard.  The activity in Putnam Plaza engages a more diverse crowd than Kentucky.  The architecture is better than Kentucky.  The recently-built Theatre Square, with its interior plaza, provides a community meeting point.  The Great American Mill and other historic structures have been lovingly maintained.  The Petaluman, the proposed boutique hotel at the corner of B Street, will hopefully provide another element to energize the street life.  (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the development team for The Petaluman.)

Petaluma Boulevard won’t get top marks on all of the PPS criteria, but it does okay.  I’d prefer to see less and better mannered traffic.  And I like to see more residences in the downtown core.  (The vacant lot between the McNear and Lanmart Buildings is an interesting site for five stories of downtown apartments.)  But overall Petaluma Boulevard works well enough.  And it’s only a block away from Kentucky Street.

Cotati: Within Cotati, the only reasonable candidate for a great street is Old Redwood Highway.  And the best four blocks of Old Redwood Highway is the segment between Page Street and the second crossing of La Plaza. 

But this segment of Old Redwood Highway, despite being the best that Cotati has to offer, illustrates another aspect of the bypass issue.  When the regional traffic was moved to 101 a few blocks away, the downtown stagnated.  It’s a pleasant place, but lacks the vitality of downtown Petaluma and other North Bay cities.

Cotati tries, they really do.  The Accordion Festival is a marvelously quirky event of which they should be proud.  But on a December Sunday morning, the street is nearly somnolent.  Jaywalking is easy, not because the traffic is well-regulated but because there is little traffic.

There is a relatively new building at the corner of Old Redwood Highway and Park that might have acted to bring energy to the street.  But there’s a gap between the remainder of downtown and the new building, a gap that includes a bridge over Cotati Creek which effectively acts as a ceremonial entrance into downtown, effectively putting the new building outside of downtown.

Overall, it’s a shame.  I want to like downtown Cotati.  Indeed, I do like downtown Cotati.  But in the way of great streets, Cotati doesn’t offer much.

When the weather and my schedule allows, I’ll wander further afield looking for great streets in the North Bay.

Calendar Notes

As a final reminder, the next meeting of Petaluma Chat will be Tuesday, December 9.  The topic will be a continuation of the well-attended November meeting on the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds. 

As always, all are welcome, even if you haven’t participated before.  We’ll meet in the backroom of Taps, 54 E. Washington Street, Petaluma.  We’ll convene at 5:30 and conclude around 7:00.

Next time, I’ll write about a couple of items in the most recent Petaluma paper that touched upon urbanist issues.

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

Two Old Subjects and One New

Even on a day when my only intention was to check back on past stories, a new story still popped into view.  Such is what happens when one looks at the world through urbanist glasses.  So I’ll touch upon the Popsicle Index, the Petaluma Boulevard road diet, and how urbanism affects job creation.

Popsicle Index: I’ll tackle the easiest topic first.  In my last post, I wrote about the Popsicle Index, a simple but reasonable measure of neighborhood urbanism.  During my research, my initial impression was that Catherine Austin Fitts had borrowed the idea from a Vancouver urban planner.

But the more I looked, the less sure I was.  When I published the post, the earliest internet reference still belonged to the urban planner, but the time gap was closing.  So I acknowledged the possibility that either or both had invented the index.

It seems that I was trending in the right direction, but stopped too soon.  Fitts herself emailed me with a link to a 1998 paper in which she described the Popsicle Index.  The 1998 date was five years before the first reference to the urban planner.  My job here is urbanist, not fact-checker, so I won’t dig any deeper.  But it does appear that Fitts was truly the inventor of the Popsicle Index, with others borrowing her idea since 1998.  My apologies to Ms. Fitts.

However, my original point still stands.  It’s a grand thing when people in other walks of life, such as international finance, think and speak in terms that are decidedly urbanist.

Petaluma Boulevard Road Diet: The Petaluma City Council met a few days ago to review the results of the Petaluma Boulevard road diet.

Despite the rhetoric around town since the road diet was complete, the City Council session was sedate.  At the start of the evening, the chamber was overflowing, but most were there either for recognition of the local American Legion ballclub or for a land use hearing later on the agenda.  Only a few folks seemed to have attended for the road diet discussion.

The City Engineer made a dispassionate, fact-based presentation showing that traffic along the Boulevard seemed to have increased since the road diet.  He also noted that traffic accidents were down, although the sample size was small.

There were reports of stores seeing declining sales, but other factors, such as nearby construction and the opening of a new mall, were noted as other possible causes.  Nor is there is an apparent way to unravel the multiple factors.  (As sales tax reports come available in a few months, a more complete picture of the financial changes in downtown will become available.)

Perhaps the most insightful comments of the night dealt with the mid-block crosswalks, pedestrian-activated flashing-light crossings that interfere with the carefully regulated automobile flow from the downtown traffic signals.  If pedestrians arrive at the crosswalks sufficiently staggered that the cycle of flashing lights is repeatedly restarted, traffic backups become inevitable.  It’s akin to having a finely-tuned candy-making machine at one corner and a finely-tuned candy-packing machine at the next, with Lucy Ricardo doing quality control in between.

Obviously, I’m a big proponent of walkability.  But I’m also a big proponent of downtowns, which require a careful balance of vehicles and pedestrians.  And the crosswalks are disrupting that balance.  The mid-block crossings are essential to the pedestrian health of downtown, but perhaps an alternative solution is needed whereby permission to cross is delayed until it fits with the traffic flow.

Overall, the road received a good report card.  There are areas that still need work, but Petaluma seems to have successfully adjusted the downtown modal balance.

Attracting Businesses/Employees: Also during the Petaluma City Council, the Economic Development Director spoke about a newly-started effort to attract business to Petaluma.  Overall, the approach was graphically interesting and creatively clever, although largely focused on traditional concepts of business attraction.

But there was a small point that piqued my interest.  The Economic Development spoke about the campaign having two audiences, business owners and potential employees.  It was said only once and her focus quickly returned to business owners, but it may have been a glimpse of the future.

A growing number of young adults are selecting the place where they want to live and then reviewing employment opportunities.  When I was a young adult, I declined an employment opportunity or two because I didn’t want to live in the city where the job was located, but I certainly didn’t make location my primary filter.  But young people are looking at the world differently today which is probably a good thing.

And where do more and more young people want to begin their adult lives?  In walkable urban settings.  The furor about high-tech employee buses clogging up the streets of San Francisco shows that many high-tech employees would rather live in San Francisco than Silicon Valley.

With the U.S. economy increasingly reliant on innovation and innovation largely the domain of the young, economic health of communities may depend on providing walkable urban locations that attract the young.

And perhaps the best way to attract business is to have a pool of attractive employees.

The Petaluma Economic Development Director may not have connected all those dots for the City Council, but her comment about having two audiences was the first step toward dot connection.

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

Putting the Automobile in Its Place

Urbanists don’t dislike cars.  Despite the accusations of those who fear challenges to the status quo, urbanists believe the automobile to be a remarkable innovation, essential for many human activities.

But urbanists also believe that our communities have been excessively shaped to accommodate cars.  We’ve widened streets to more easily remove people and vitality from urban cores, the concept that Jeff Speck calls “car sewers”.  We allowed so much parking that the few remaining pedestrians have little at which to gaze except bumpers.  We’ve reconfigured our homes so that garage doors are often the dominant feature.  And we’ve made it impossible for many to buy a gallon of milk without using an ignition key.

Urbanists believe that we need to rebalance our approach to cars so that cars appear to be serving us, not the reverse. 

There are a number of tools available for this task, including providing housing within walkable distance of shopping and transit, widening sidewalks to create places conducive to gathering, and placing parking in less obtrusive locations. Another tool is road diets.

About a year ago, while writing about a related topic, I offered an introduction to road diets.  From that post, “A road diet is a reduction in the travel lanes of an existing street, converting some of the pavement area to other uses, such as additional parking, center turn pockets, or sidewalks bulbs for traffic calming.

“Although reducing travel lanes would intuitively seem to reduce traffic capacity, the reduction can be less than expected.  If the existing lanes are unusually narrow, … the current capacity may be less than indicated by the lane count.  Meanwhile, the revised configuration can improve vehicle and pedestrian safety.”

I was writing about a proposed road diet in Petaluma that was under design at the time.  Since then, the project has been completed.  Combined with an earlier road diet phase, much of Petaluma Boulevard through downtown Petaluma has been converted from four lanes to two.

The Petaluma Boulevard road diet was controversial.  Many didn’t believe that road capacity could be maintained despite the fewer lanes.  Others were quick to find fault with the traffic in the first days after the road diet was complete.  As a result, the City Council asked for a report on the road diet results.  The City Engineer is scheduled to present preliminary findings at the October 21 council meeting.

I suspect that much of the response to the road diet has been comprised of auto-confirmations (pun intended), with those who expected the road diet to fail now finding that it has failed and those who believed it would succeed are also finding confirmation.  It will be good for the discussion to have actual data.

At a meeting I attended last week, the City Engineer described some of his initial data.  I won’t undercut his presentation by repeating his comments here, but I’ll suggest that anyone interested in the Petaluma road diet and in the hopes of reassessing our relationship with the automobile should attend the October 21 meeting.

In the meantime, readers are encouraged to post their own comments on the road diet below.  If the conversation is good, particularly if it is data-based, I’ll pass the comments along to the City Engineer.

Which opens the door for my own thoughts.  I was hopeful that the road diet would work, making Petaluma Boulevard a safer place for bicyclists and a more comfortable place for pedestrians.  And I thought the previous traffic capacity, with four reduced-width lanes, might not be significantly different than the new traffic capacity with two normal-width lanes.

Therefore, my initial reaction upon completion of the road diet was consternation.  Congestion, particularly queuing at signals, seemed noticeably worse.

An often-overlooked fact of traffic engineering is that lanes do more than allow the movement of cars.  They also provide a place for stopped traffic to wait for a signal change.  Assuming the same number of stopped vehicles, the queue on a two-lane street will extend twice as far as on a four-lane street, making traffic signal timing crucial.

(Traffic storage is the same reason many single-lane freeway off-ramps quickly widen to two or more lanes.  The extra lanes provide a place for vehicles to wait before joining the surface street, preventing a potentially disastrous backup onto the freeway of stopped vehicles.)

To their credit, City Public Works anticipated that traffic signal timing might need tweaking.  Computer models are great, but sometimes real world data, with us drivers as the guinea pigs, is required.  Public Works had set aside funds to make adjustments.  Over the first few weeks of the road diet operation, fine-tuning was done and the road diet seemed to move closer to success.

But there are still occasional hiccups.  A local architect astutely observed that congestion can quickly build up, and only slowly dissipate, when a driver does a poor job of parallel parking.  If two or three passes are required to successfully park, the congestion can linger for several minutes afterward.  But drivers are unwilling to pass on a scarce parking place, so continue to maneuver despite a growing line of cars.

Thus, it’s possible that a parking management program will be required before the road diet can achieve its full potential.  Parking management could mean many things, from increased enforcement of prohibitions on employee parking to parking meters.  Either way, the typical goal of a parking management plans is to ensure that there are always a few parking spaces available, making drivers more willing to pass on the undersized space where parking may be difficult and slow.

Those are my thoughts on the road diet.  I’ll await yours.  And I remain hopeful that we can find a way to coexist with cars more comfortably.

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