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!