The Manifesto

The Manifesto is a running bullet list of the things I think we should have at the very top of our local to-do list.

• Move the Santa Rosa Greyhound stop downtown, at or adjacent to the existing transit mall. I remember taking Greyhound to Santa Rosa with my family when I was a little kid in what was then a car-free family. I don't recall a lot of detail, but it was definitely an enclosed station in the middle of town. Now the 'hound stops at a ridiculously out-of-the-way location, outside a small hotel miles south of downtown. The people who make decisions like locating a city's Greyhound stop in a place like this must really be so clueless as to think deep down inside that every single person in the U.S. has a car waiting to pick them up wherever they go. Either that or they just plain don't care about the segment of society that's poor or demented enough to actually ride (snort!) buses.
• Build us a few bike/ped-friendly alternatives for getting across Highway 101 in Santa Rosa. I wrote a post on this.
• Upgrade Santa Rosa's City Bus to a system that a city of 170,000 deserves. I moved here from a city of 17,000 where the local buses run until 10 pm weeknights. Now I'm in a community ten times as large where the buses shut down around 8 pm. How does one explain that? A few improvements are in order: 1) The buses should run until at least 10 pm, if not midnight. 2) The buses should run more frequently than their current 30 to 60 minute intervals. 3) The bus stops should all include covered shelter and the equipment many bus systems already use, that shows riders in real time how long until the next bus comes.
• Eliminate "No Ped Crossing" barricades. In most locations, these could be eliminated by the introduction of some traffic calming measures to ensure safe crossing for pedestrians. The barricades are yet another insult to walkers, telling them that motorists and their right to whip through town at unsafe speeds always come first.
• Stop roadside herbicide spraying. Humboldt and some other northern California counties made the switch years ago to manual vegetation management.
• Improve bike and pedestrian connectivity between adjacent subdivisions. Make bike/ped pathways connecting these neighborhoods a required condition of approval for new developments, and look for ways to add them to existing neighborhoods, even if it means paying for some rights-of-way across private property.