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.