ABAG's Got My Back

Petaluma360.com tells how Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) deputy executive director Brad Paul seems to agree with the thesis of my recent letter to the Press-Democrat...and adds some good ideas of his own. Paul says:

“There is so much demand for housing in the Bay Area, yet I’ve heard statistics saying that 40 percent of single family homes are owned by a single occupant. That is usually an elderly person who can’t find a new place that will be equal to the home they own. That dries up the market for younger people wanting to purchase their first home.”... He said local governments should make it easier for owners of single-family homes to subdivide them into apartments and 2nd-unit “inlaw” rentals. He also supported more aggressive “acquisition rehabilitation” programs on the part of local governments, where a city purchases dilapidated housing, repairs the homes and then puts them on the market for rent or sale to low-income families, usually with some financial subsidization by the local government.

See the full article. Rock on, Brad Paul!

Affordable Housing without the Sprawl

Here's a letter I just sent our local daily, the Press Democrat, responding to their article on a new push for residential homebuilding.

It's true that affordable housing is in short supply locally. However, the stock response many are calling for, i.e. to keep building sprawling new subdivisions and condo complexes, will inevitably skew toward the more affluent and continue to erode the County's environmental quality.

Looking around Santa Rosa, I note an abundance of larger homes, built a half-century ago for big families and now housing one or two retirees. The smart solution to affordable housing at this point would be to identify and address all the hurdles that stand in the way of splitting these big suburban houses into two or three units that can be rented or sold separately. It will take a comprehensive re-think of zoning, building codes, bank lending protocols, tax incentives, and more. Daunting, sure, but these are all just policy obstacles, which means all we really have to do is get some key people to change their minds. 

Look at the Victorian-era houses in old neighborhoods, originally single family homes that were split up nearly a century ago into multiple units to accommodate smaller, less affluent households during the Depression. It's time to re-visit that kind of adaptive thinking about truly affordable housing. 

Signs that Lie

Until recently, I was aware of only one of these, and I dismissed it as an unfortunate anomaly. But now I know of at least two little residential areas near my own Santa Rosa neighborhood where the "NO PARK ACCESS" signs on the access roads leading into the developments are not telling the truth. In both cases, I have found these very streets lead to lovely trailheads into Howarth Park. These are clearly legitimate park entrances, given the paved path between two houses in one case and the carefully built and maintained fencing lining the other entrance.

I can understand a desire on the part of both the city and the neighborhoods' denizens to not have the narrow streets of these quiet residential areas become clogged with the cars of hikers, picnickers, and mountain bikers from all over town. At the same time, I perceive what's going on here through my own class warfare lens, as affluent homeowners who can afford to live adjacent to the park wanting to keep privileged access to themselves. Plus there's a typically Santa Rosan car-centricity to this issue. It's only because it's assumed people are going to be driving to these neighborhoods and leaving parked cars in residents' ways that there's a problem. People entering these neighborhoods on foot, as I usually do, to access the trailheads is unlikely to ruffle anyone's feathers.

Whether these are fair perceptions on my part or not, let's not post dishonest signage to achieve our crowd control aims. I think it would be fair, reasonable, and truthful to replace the NO PARK ACCESS signs with PED/BIKE PARK ACCESS ONLY or NO VEHICLE ACCESS TO PARK signs.

Until the city and the residents are ready for that change, here are my secret directions to these trailheads. See you there.

1. Heading east on Montgomery Drive from downtown Santa Rosa, turn right on Jackson Drive and go three blocks uphill, then turn right on Sullivan Way. The trailhead will be on your left, about six houses up along Sullivan. (It's shown on Google Maps.)
2. Again heading east on Montgomery from downtown, turn right on Summerfield Road, then left on Rock Springs Drive.Turn left on Quartz Drive, then left again on Slate Drive. The trailhead is on your left, opposite Quarry Pointe Drive. (How do developers come up with these street names? This trailhead also shows up on Google Maps, as a narrow green strip.)

Culs-de-Sac and Connectivity

Santa Rosa's layout at times reminds me of a giant version of McKinleyville, an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, just to the north of my erstwhile home, Arcata. Like McKinleyville, Santa Rosa appears to have a history of subdivisions planned in isolation from the surrounding community. As a result, entire neighborhoods may have a couple of street connections to a major thoroughfare, but no streets connecting the residents with adjacent neighborhoods. If your kids want to go visit their classmates in the next subdivision on foot or by bike, they have to go out to the busy trunk road to get there. This isn't such a big problem in McKinleyville, a small town where traffic is relatively light. But in Santa Rosa, it can be downright dangerous to get from one neighborhood to the next if you don't subscribe to the local norm of climbing into your SUV to make the trip.

Santa Rosa could use a lot more pedestrian/bike connectors between the ends of culs-de-sac or adjacent residential streets that are not connected for car travel. Our neighborhood has one good example of what I'm talking about, an unassuming gap in a fence that connects Ahl Park Court with the corner of Sandra Way and Lurline Way. This simple portal is designated in purple ink as a "bike path" on the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition's Sonoma County bike map. Scanning the rest of that map, one gets the sense such connectors are a pretty rare feature in this city.

Hopefully future development in Santa Rosa can make such bike/ped connections a required condition of approval. It can be hard to retrofit them into existing developments, but we should look for places this could be done and add them. 

This topic may seem like community planning minutiae. But I believe it's the sum total of little things like this that add up to whether a community really is walkable, or whether it becomes the kind of place where people feel practically compelled to start up their car nearly every time they leave the house. 

Roadside Spray

This time of year, when the grass is green all over, it's easy to notice something I'd overlooked since moving to Sonoma County last summer. The one place the grass isn't green is in a narrow strip a foot or so wide at the very edge of the highway. A telltale sign of recent herbicide application.

Honestly I was a bit shocked the first time I noticed this a couple weeks ago. Long ago I took the practice of roadside spraying in stride, but Humboldt County got wise and banned it many years ago, replacing it with manual vegetation management -- a bit more costly up-front, but with fewer harmful environmental consequences. A little searching online shows me that several other northern California counties have also gotten Cal Trans to drop roadside spraying. Given its environmentally conscious populace, I'm surprised to see Sonoma County is still poisoning its roadside vegetation.

No Ped Crossing

What's up with these things?

I know, the obvious reason for these barricades is to stop pedestrians from crossing where it's unsafe. But why is it unsafe? Seems like a cheap remedy for poor traffic engineering at the expense of walkers. I'd like to see Santa Rosa make it a policy to phase these out everywhere it's feasible to do so, even if it means adding some traffic calming measures like bulbouts (curb extensions) at corners.

There are certain corners where I think the pedestrian barricades make no sense. See for example the west side of the intersection of Steele Lane and County Center Drive. If you're at the bail bond shop on the southwest corner and you want to visit the mini-mart or fast food joint (ah, the cultural richness that is Santa Rosa!) on the northwest corner, you have to cross east, then north, then west, each time waiting for a traffic signal, rather than cross a single street. If the people who design and build these things had to live with the consequences every day, they wouldn't stand it for a minute.

Massive Transit Fail

I've noted how inadequate our local bus service in the Santa Rosa area seems, given how large a community this is. My only metrics for this were the limited hours of service, low frequency of service on each route, and my casual perception of low ridership.

My friend Mike just shared with me an online resource that gives us a quantitative look at just how poorly we fare in urban transit compared with the rest of the country. Check out:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-your-citys-public-transit-stacks-up/

This link features a searchable list of 290 of the country's major urban areas. The greater Santa Rosa area, with over 314,000 people, is well above the threshold for inclusion in this list.The table is ranked by how many transit rides per capita took place in each metropolis in 2013. Not surprisingly, New York City comes in first by a mile with 229.8 trips per capita. SF-Oakland is a distant second with 131.5 rides.

Santa Rosa? 125th with just 12.3 rides per person. OK, let's not make a big deal about us being less transit-friendly than the nation's biggest urban areas. Let's make some fairer comparisons. Santa Cruz, half the size of greater Santa Rosa with 169,000 people, nearly triples our per-capita ridership at 33.1. Fresno (670,000), which just about no one in Sonoma County would look to as a greener or more enlightened community, beats us with 17.3 rides. Chico, Santa Barbara, Stockton, Oxnard, and quite a few other California cities larger and smaller than us, also beat our ridership. (OK, some California cities do worse than us, but pretty few.)

So what's going on here? I doubt Santa Rosans are all that ideologically opposed to public transit. Public transit gets its share of lip service, but not many butts on the seats. Maybe it's an affluent enough community that more people have the choice to drive here than in other places. Whatever other factors are at work, I really do think a serious investment in better service -- more frequent trips, more routes, and longer operating hours -- would get results and make us look better in those rankings next time around. It will be interesting to see how County transit's new policy of free service for veterans and college students affects ridership for 2015.

Remember to Listen

I get so caught up in my certainty about what's wrong with the way things are, and how they should be fixed. It pays to stop and listen to the perspectives of others now and then.

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At the Santa Rosa Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Board meeting I attended a few weeks ago, I learned there was an application in process to have Santa Rosa named as a Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists. "Bah!" I thought. "Santa Rosa asking to be called a bicycle-friendly community is like an alcoholic asking to be honored as a champion of sobriety for going dry for a week." My impression of Santa Rosa in my first half-year here is that it's a city that willfully turned its back on bikes and pedestrians for the better part of a century and has only very lately begun to re-think that.

So I asked somewhat cynically to have a review copy of the application, expecting to see something rather half-baked. I finally last night made time to read through the whole thing...and I was quite impressed. Santa Rosa city staff clearly worked their butts off to respond to the enormous number of questions on the application, and in the process they show off quite an arsenal of strategies and measures the city has taken or is currently working on to really tip the balance in favor of bikes. Little did I know the city has an ordinance on the books requiring all new non-residential buildings to include showers and locker rooms for cycle commuters! (Is this really being enforced?) Go Santa Rosa!

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Yesterday I had a chance conversation on the street with a couple a few years my senior. Surrounded by lanes of speeding traffic at Steele Lane and Cleveland Avenue, I asked them if they thought Santa Rosa was a bike-friendly city. "As much as any other city," they answered. Maybe they're right, and the place just seems hostile to bikers and walkers to me because I've had the good fortune to spend my life in relatively bike-happy places. They told me as recreational cyclists, they were pretty satisfied with the physical layout of Santa Rosa for bikes, and they thought the main thing missing was education for motorists on how to share the road with riders. "But cyclists could use some education, too," they added. "We practically got knocked over the other day by a guy zooming down the sidewalk on his bike." True enough - Santa Rosans on bikes seem just as likely to scoff the law as drivers are...though even the most careless cyclists typically are not putting others at as much risk as are those wielding the speeding tons of steel...while texting, no less!

A Great Leap Forward for Local Bus Service

I have watched for decades as bus service in the various communities where I've lived has struggled to maintain existing levels of service, with an occasional, tentative move toward increased service. Ridership remains low, and this perceived lack of demand is taken as reason enough to leave things alone. Of course, it's a self-defeating arrangement, where no one who has a choice wants to leave their car at home when the transit option is so much less convenient. I would love to see City Bus here in Santa Rosa get serious about providing a level of service that would really get people away from driving alone. Of course there's a whole litany of problems that need to be solved to get there, and describing those problems and some possible solutions is my main motive for doing this blog.

There are several big changes we could make to City Bus that could be real game changers. The status quo is a system where the buses shut down for the night around 8 pm and run at 30- or 60-minute intervals, pretty sad for a county seat with a population of 170,000. Let's run the buses until at least 10 pm, and double frequency of service. And let's add some cross-town routes so one doesn't have to transfer between lines downtown to travel the length or breadth of the city. Let's install shelters at every stop, with technology to inform waiting passengers how long until the next bus arrives.

This will all cost a ton of money, of course. Right now, with gas selling for half what it cost a year ago, is a great time to talk about paying for these improvements with a substantial local gasoline tax.

Happy Thoughts

I started this blog as a place to kvetch about what's not right in my new home, Sonoma County. But being the positive, upbeat person I naturally am, I need to take a break from all the whining and share some positive items.

• In my last post, I dreamed up what I thought would be the single most valuable addition to Santa Rosa's infrastructure to make the city a friendlier place to cyclists and walkers. I proposed the incredibly original idea of a bike/pedestrian bridge connecting Santa Rosa Junior College with Codding Town Mall on the opposite side of Highway 101. As a naive newcomer to Sonoma County, little did I dream this very idea has been in the works for some time, complete with a 200-page feasibility study, cost over-runs, and apparently plenty of political controversy. I learned about this in casual conversation with co-workers the very day after I posted my pipe dream. Let's do it, Santa Rosa!
• One indicator Santa Rosa is headed in the right direction in providing bike infrastructure: Many of the older commercial areas I visit are totally lacking in bike racks. But the newer big shops at Codding Town, namely Target and Whole Foods, each have big ol' rows of racks right outside, conveniently close to their main entrances. Kudos to Codding Town!
• The City of Santa Rosa does provide an outlet for any of us who want to rant in public about non-motorized transportation before a captive audience. It's the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board, and their next meeting is this Thursday, January 15 at 4 pm in the City Hall Annex, 90 Santa Rosa Avenue, Conference Room 7A and 7B. Be there! 

California Über Alles

From Jerry Brown's inaugural address this past Monday:

Finally, neither California nor indeed the world itself can ignore the growing assault on the very systems of nature on which human beings and other forms of life depend. Edward O. Wilson, one of the world's preeminent biologists and naturalists, offered this sobering thought:

"Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have. The evidence for climate warming, with industrial pollution as the principal cause, is now overwhelming. Also evident upon even casual inspection is the rapid disappearance of tropical forests and grasslands and other habitats where most of the diversity of life exists." With these global changes, he went on to say, "we are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants."

California has the most far-reaching environmental laws of any state and the most integrated policy to deal with climate change of any political jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere. Under laws that you have enacted, we are on track to meet our 2020 goal of one-third of our electricity from renewable energy. We lead the nation in energy efficiency, cleaner cars and energy storage. Recently, both the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the World Bank made clear that properly pricing carbon is a key strategy. California's cap-and-trade system fashioned under AB 32 is doing just that and showing how the market itself can generate the innovations we need. Beyond this, California is forging agreements with other states and nations so that we do not stand alone in advancing these climate objectives.

These efforts, impressive though they are, are not enough. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, backed up by the vast majority of the world's scientists, has set an ambitious goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2050 through drastic reductions of greenhouse gases. If we have any chance at all of achieving that, California, as it does in many areas, must show the way. We must demonstrate that reducing carbon is compatible with an abundant economy and human well-being. So far, we have been able to do that.

In fact, we are well on our way to meeting our AB 32 goal of reducing carbon pollution and limiting the emissions of heat-trapping gases to 431 million tons by 2020. But now, it is time to establish our next set of objectives for 2030 and beyond.

Toward that end, I propose three ambitious goals to be accomplished within the next 15 years:
Increase from one-third to 50 percent our electricity derived from renewable sources;
Reduce today's petroleum use in cars and trucks by up to 50 percent;
Double the efficiency of existing buildings and make heating fuels cleaner.

We must also reduce the relentless release of methane, black carbon and other potent pollutants across industries. And we must manage farm and rangelands, forests and wetlands so they can store carbon. All of this is a very tall order. It means that we continue to transform our electrical grid, our transportation system and even our communities.

I envision a wide range of initiatives: more distributed power, expanded rooftop solar, micro-grids, an energy imbalance market, battery storage, the full integration of information technology and electrical distribution and millions of electric and low-carbon vehicles. How we achieve these goals and at what pace will take great thought and imagination mixed with pragmatic caution. It will require enormous innovation, research and investment. And we will need active collaboration at every stage with our scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, businesses and officials at all levels.

Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels. This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

Well, that all sounds pretty good to me. Except the bit about "reducing carbon is compatible with an abundant economy." Contrast that claim with Naomi Klein in her recently published This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate:

“Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”

I think Naomi's version of the truth is more unvarnished on this point.

Highway 101: Santa Rosa's Great Divide

The worst crime against the people of Santa Rosa has to be the design and construction of Highway 101 through the city. It's not necessarily a bad thing that there's a major freeway dividing the city east and west, but the way it was done shows total disregard for pedestrians and cyclists. Only if you assume everyone is traveling around the city in a private automobile does the design appear to make some sense.

I would define a standard by which any freeway crossing should be designed. It should be a place where one would feel safe biking the route with a twelve-year-old child, or walking it with an elderly relative. If we're not building this way, we're doing things seriously wrong. By that measure, the only places I would care to cross Highway 101 in all of Santa Rosa are, from south to north, the Earle Street pedestrian bridge, the Prince Memorial Greenway (a creekside urban gem that should be replicated a dozen times along Santa Rosa's section of 101!) and the street crossings at 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th streets.

So that's a paltry half-dozen decent crossings, with all but the Earle Street bridge squeezed together in a half-mile downtown stretch. This leaves miles of Santa Rosa to the north and south of downtown with no user-friendly crossings. College Avenue and Steele Lane I'm willing to take on alone, though I find them unpleasant and somewhat dangerous with the freeway on- and off-ramps to contend with. Forget about taking young or old companions through those on foot or on bikes.

Solutions? I would make it a priority to develop more Earle Street-style bridges, that would cross not only the freeway but the adjacent frontage roads such as Cleveland Avenue and Armory Drive. As a first goal, let's come up with a way for people to walk between Santa Rosa Junior College campus and Codding Town mall without having to cross any major streets.

Let's take a minute to consider the bigger picture. California has a codified plan saying we shall reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. In real time, we're way above those 1990 levels and climbing, despite a brief dip during the economic downturn a couple years back. If we're serious about reaching that goal, we have to make BIG changes, and start making them soon. Transportation-related emissions make up over a quarter of the greenhouse gases produced in this country. We have to turn Santa Rosa, and every city in California, into a place where it's truly more attractive and economic to get out of your car than to drive around. We have to reinvent every big and little aspect of how we design, build, maintain, and fund our cities and their transportation infrastructure. This is what's driving me to write this blog, and all my schemes and dreams are aimed at making these changes happen.

Climate Protection

Now I live in a county where "Climate Protection" is part of the name of both a non-profit organization and a government agency, so this particular term bears some discussion. Are we talking about protecting the climate from us, or ourselves from the climate?

During a staff meeting this morning, I had an epiphany on this question. The contemporary discussion of response to climate change revolves on two separate but related courses of action: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means working to halt or reduce the causes of climate change. Adaptation recognizes some inevitability in climate change and seeks to stave off the worst of the consequences.

So now I think we can frame climate protection thus: mitigation is protecting the climate from us, while adaptation is about protecting us from the climate.

Day Zero

Introduction

I moved to Sonoma County in mid-2014. There's a lot to like here, including a high level of environmental awareness in the community. Still, I see so much untapped opportunity every day to help Sonoma County better live up to its green aspirations.*

OK, that was an attempt to be diplomatic and polite to the many Sonomans who have given me and my wife such a warm welcome to our new community. But honestly, I find myself screaming silently inside my head almost every day: What were the planners, developers, and engineers thinking when they laid out the streets and developed the public transit of this car-crazy place!? I know many of the most egregious features of the built landscape here are a legacy of decisions made many decades ago. But still, some of the infrastructure seems to me so dysfunctional it should be treated as a public safety emergency by today's leaders.

I'm launching this blog to share ideas and make connections with people who might be thinking similar thoughts to those I mutter under my breath as I bike, walk, and bus my way across Santa Rosa each day. Please let me know what you're muttering about.

More as a note to myself than anything, here are a few topics I'm hoping to cover in the near future -- with maps, photos, and other fun features!

•  Highway 101: Santa Rosa's great divide for the car-less 
•  Pedestrian-unfriendly landscapes: a case study on Steele Lane 
•  City Bus: really? 60 minutes between buses and no service after ~8pm?? In a city of 170,000? 
•  Imagining a great leap forward in public transit 
•  Pedestrian-favoring infrastructure: on-demand street crossing 

By the way, this marks my second ever attempt at a blog. The first I kept while teaching in El Salvador for half a year.

* I'm fortunate to get to work on those green aspirations every day through my job with the County's Energy and Sustainability Division and my volunteer work with the Sonoma County Trails Council. But I want to make it clear that what I write in this blog is strictly my own thoughts and is in no way endorsed by either of those organizations.