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.