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.