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HomeMy WebLinkAbout9/4/2018 Item 15, Schmidt Purrington, Teresa From:Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com> Sent:Saturday, September 1, 2018 3:26 PM To:E-mail Council Website Cc:Harmon, Heidi; Pease, Andy; Christianson, Carlyn; Rivoire, Dan; Gomez, Aaron Subject:Agenda: Anholm Bikeway Attachments:council bikeway sept 18.doc; council bikeway gen plan amend.doc; council cycle tracks sept 18.doc Dear Council Members, Attached are comments about the agenda item on the bikeway. For ease in dealing with them, I've made three separate letters, each on a single subject: 1. Comments on the 3 different Broad Bike Boulevard proposals, one by staff and two by neighbors which staff fails to present to you accurately and completely. 2. Comments on the General Plan amendments pertaining to reclassification of four neighborhood streets due to hypothetical traffic volume increases. 3. Comments on the lack of safety of the cycle tracks proposed by BikeSLO and the ATC. Thank you for considering these matters. Richard Schmidt 1 Aug. 31, 2018 Re: Anholm Bikeway Plans Dear Council Members, The last time you considered this matter, you directed staff to develop plans for a “bike boulevard” on Broad. You are now presented with such three plans – one by staff and two from neighbors. Probably no one of them is perfect at this moment, but by your seriously studying them and with continued work the city should certainly be able to develop a reasonable way to proceed with bike enhancement without destroying the neighborhood’s livability in the process. You are also presented with an all-court press concocted by a small faction of bike radicals demanding that since there’s “no consensus” – as if there could ever be a consensus when that faction refuses to budge one millimeter from its hardened positions – that you now direct construction of cycle tracks. For the council to do that would demonstrate its perfidy to the neighborhood, and would escalate things beyond your control. So, please, for the good of all, ignore this organized lobbying that includes many emails from persons entirely outside our community. That these radicals don’t wish to participate in finding a solution along the lines you directed gives them no right to attempt to torpedo your prior decision. I would like to address and comment upon the three plans, only one of which you have seen because staff has seen fit not to present you with the Anholm Neighbors’ two active plans, but rather with one long abandoned by us (the one with the Murray blockade, a trial balloon we contemplated as a way to discourage ALL through traffic in the neighborhood, not just on Broad) despite staff’s knowing we’d long abandoned that plan (prior to planning commission consideration, at which meeting we had to go through this same effort to point out staff was presenting decision-makers an obsolete idea for a possible “plan” from us. It’s important for those of you inexperienced in design to understand that good plans aren’t born complete and final, that both staff’s and ours have had to go through many iterations to get where they are, and even at this point all can doubtless still be improved.). The Three Plans. 1. Complete Broad Closure at Meinecke/Ramona plus widespread traffic calming. This is the staff plan. It is adequately documented in your packet. Comments: While this plan has interesting features, it also has problems. • The principal one is it locks residents into their neighborhood. To go to and from the neighborhood grocery by car would require roundabout travel through already congested traffic at Chorro/Foothill/Broad, considerable idling, and considerable additional GHG emissions compared to present routes. You must decide if that extra driving and GHG emission is a reasonable tradeoff for at most a hundred or two bike trips per day. • I’d also caution that total closure could endanger residents in the event of a Santa Rosa-like conflagration blowing down San Luis Mountain. Our escape would be north on Broad (barricaded in this plan) or east on Murray and Meinecke, which alone could not carry all the escape traffic from our entire neighborhood. Slowing our ability to evacuate could be deadly. Any barricade must be automatically passable in an emergency, without a city employee needing to remove bollards or whatever. • Staff’s rationale for believing this plan will reduce northbound traffic on Broad escapes me. Through traffic from the freeway, which is the major through-traffic source, will, it seems to me, travel all the way out Broad to Meinecke, then turn right to Chorro. There’s zero inducement to cut over sooner. For this plan to work as advertised, some traffic must be diverted from Broad as far south as possible. • Granted, the southbound barrier at Ramona should considerably reduce southbound traffic on Broad. Ramona is a good place for a southbound barrier. 2. Partial Closure of Broad at two points plus widespread traffic calming. This is a plan drawn up by Anholm Neighbors on the chance the council insists upon a solid diverter system, and is unwilling to consider our preference, extensive neighborhood- wide traffic calming. We asked ourselves how we could best insert solid diverters so as to accomplish traffic diversion from Broad without the problems caused by locking residents into the neighborhood? The plan is based on collective centuries’ worth of traffic observation, and was hashed out with experienced urban design/planning professionals. It merits your respect. Here’s a brief version. (I should add that the overhead photos in your packet are not ours, and do a poor and inaccurate job of presenting our ideas. Someone will be sending you our drawings soon.) • Closure of southbound Broad, Ramona to Meinecke. This is the same location as staff’s proposed closure. This seems the ideal southbound barrier location since much – and at some times of day most – of southbound traffic comes from Ramona. That traffic will be directed back to Foothill. (Note: staff’s overhead photo of a closure on Broad north of Ramona is another now-obsolete trial balloon we floated, not our suggested plan. Their critique about its directing traffic into the shopping center is therefore not relevant to what we’re proposing.) • Closure of northbound Broad at Mountain View. This seems the logical place for diversion of freeway traffic northbound on Broad. Lincoln doesn’t work for a variety of reasons, including impeding use of Lincoln Deli’s parking lot and the existence of a short and easy detour. This blockage would be configured like the one at Ramona, not like the one in the staff overhead photo which would be easy to drive around and would do nothing to block northbound Broad from traffic turning right from Mt. View. • Northbound Broad at Ramona and southbound Broad at Mt. View would remain open so neighbors can get out. The one-side closures necessitate some roundabout driving for neighborhood residents, but far less than staff’s proposal. • One of the salient and beautiful traffic calming proposals in this plan is what we call “traffic diffusers” at key intersections. These landscaped islands at corners are intended not just to slow traffic but also to announce to drivers a “point of entry” -- that they are entering a neighborhood, a peaceful special place, and are encouraged by this symbolism to calm down. Such psychological signals are important in urban design. Our surroundings influence our behavior. Unfortunately, staff seems to understand our diffusers only as engineering objects and has reduced them in their aerial photograms to lifeless little lumps in the middle of the street serving some indeterminable purpose, apparently offering neither beauty nor amenity, and perhaps not even speed reduction. 3. Extensive traffic calming throughout neighborhood, but especially on Broad. The council ordered “traffic diversion” on Broad to lighten and slow traffic. While staff has assumed that means a physical barrier across the street, I maintain “traffic diversion” can be attained in other ways as well. Put in enough friction, and traffic will look for alternative routes; that is a form of diversion. That is the rationale for this proposal. It is essentially Anholm Neighbors’ Plan 2 (physical diverters plus traffic calming) minus the diverters, plus some additional calming experiments. This is also the recommendation of the Planning Commission. It’s worth noting that unlike the ATC, which has an apparent inability to hear what they don’t want to hear, the PC was shaken by the impacts of what they saw being proposed for our neighborhood, and therefore said rather than jump into the deep end of an icy pool the city should first test the waters gradually to see what’s necessary and possible. I interpret their message to be “Slow down folks,” and I heartily agree. Some on the council are prejudiced against a traffic calming solution, proclaiming it will never work. But how do you know that without it’s being tried? The existing mild traffic calming on North Broad, 4 speed humps and 3 stop signs, has brought down daytime speeds from 70 mph to 26 mph (both by city measurement). What might more serious traffic calming be able to accomplish? How can the city just write off this quality of life improving idea? I believe this plan is worth a try. If it works, it will show that non-textbook site- designed neighborhood-specific alternatives are good solutions. It is the minimally intrusive way to slow traffic and make biking more pleasant. (“Pleasant” is the issue. There are no significant safety problems on our street. I did a public records request for five years of data on bike-vehicle accidents on Chorro and Broad, Lincoln to Meinecke, and the police department said there was none they could provide me. They did report bike hit-and-runs on cars, which unfortunately are fairly common – two of my vehicles have been anonymously hit and damaged – and reflect poorly on the ethical responsibility of some bicyclists.) The Elephant in the Room. Broad Street is an uneasy fit for a bike boulevard as long as the freeway ramps remain open. If they were closed, that alone might provide all the “diversion” a bike boulevard needs. Staff keeps repeating that CalTrans will not close the ramps till they have $60 million for improvements elsewhere. Unfortunately, the council accepts this constant repetition as hard fact, apparently not doing its own research. This is an important issue, for a reasonable way to start towards closure is a trial closure for a year, as was done at Brisco Road. In that case, as in this, CalTrans feared dire consequences at other interchanges, which did not in fact occur. What if the same were the case here? Might CalTrans then be willing to speed up closure, knowing they did not need to do $60 million of work first? Staff insists trial closure is not an option. Our contacts with CalTrans suggest otherwise, that they’d be open to a trial closure request from the city. So, perhaps rather than telling staff, who for some reason seem to want to obstruct this, to ask again – perhaps it’s time for the mayor and city manager to sit with CalTrans themselves to get this going – and if they say no, to sit with Assemblyman Cunningham and Senator Monning and ask for their help to get things moving. A trial closure of the freeway ramps during a Plan 3 trial would answer a lot of questions about what’s actually needed to make biking on Broad more pleasant. Conclusions: 1. The council must understand there are no sure solutions, only conjectures, and therefore should move cautiously, and not overstep. This project is an experiment. All projections by staff are just that – guesses, not facts, about how any plan will work and what it will do. What’s wrong with using the precautionary principle for projects like this: “First, Do no harm?” 2. Adopting an ideological solution pushed by the city’s most powerful special interest, BikeSLO, simply because they can make a lot of noise, is very poor governance. Especially given the abusive impacts of that ideological solution on a neighborhood, and the contempt spokespersons for their point of view have expressed towards the neighbors and their concerns. 3. None of you have the political experience to understand what overstepping will cause to happen. This neighborhood has been there before. The city came in, did some poorly thought-out and way too ambitious changes to traffic flow, and soon all hell let loose. You may think this issue is between the bike radicals and neighborhood residents. Well, let me tell you there is a constituency of thousands from whom you’ve yet heard nothing who will call for your scalps. OK, perhaps a bit melodramatic, but you really have no idea the monster you’ll be poking if you do too much too fast. 4. Gradualism, with acknowledged experimentation, is therefore the answer. Whatever you do must be phased in gradually. The only way major traffic calming will be palatable to the larger public is if you do it in modest sensible increments over several years. Do it all at once, game’s over. My hope is you will realize the craziness of the BikeSLO/ATC position and deposit it in the trash bin, once and for all; no neighborhood deserves to be treated the way their scheme would treat ours. Then that you will carefully consider the merits and possible benefits of all 3 Broad boulevard plans before you, and will direct staff to develop another plan iteration based on phased traffic calming plus a simultaneous trial closure of the freeway ramps. The council should work to create a win-win for bikes AND the neighborhood, not the lose-lose infliction the BikeSLO/ATC position will become. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt Aug. 31, 2018 Re: Anholm Bikeway General Plan Amendments Dear Council Members, I request that you do not enact the general plan amendments regarding street reclassifications requested by staff but rejected by the Planning Commission. I support the Commission’s stance on this, as the “need” for such amendments at this time is non-existent and the alleged “future need” is based solely on conjecture about 1 traffic flow supported by an obviously flawed traffic modeling algorithm. The PC said they’d reconsider if future evidence shows actual need. They’ve got that right, in my view. I also support Professor Dandekar’s splendid explanation to you why this is bad policy. I offer a contrasting but related view of my own that gets to the same conclusion. First, the general plan does NOT require reclassification of a street merely because traffic volume exceeds a certain level. This is a recent new story from staff, not supported by planning practices going back decades. It abandons a generous humanistic, quality-of-life view of planning’s purpose for a paper-shuffling check-the- boxes view of planning’s purpose. Staff proposes reclassifying Lincoln and Chorro as arterials solely because traffic volumes may further exceed desired levels for collectors due to hypothetical future “diversion” from Broad. However, the General Plan’s street classifications involve qualitative and functional issues beyond mere traffic volumes. I suggest to you that those qualitative and functional issues of these residential streets will not have changed even if staff’s guesses about future volumes are on target, and thus the change in classification appears both unwise and unwarranted. Traffic volumes on Broad and Chorro are way down from the 1980s. Even with the hypothetical increase staff’s traffic model suggests, traffic volumes are anticipated to 1 The flaws are suspected from numerous non-sequiturs in staff’s conclusions supposedly derived from the model. In one case flaws stand out especially starkly. In analysis of the trial balloon closure of Chorro at Murray, they concluded southbound traffic on Chorro would turn right on Meinecke, left on Benton, down that steep hill to Murray, across Murray and back to Chorro. Why in the world would anybody go to all that trouble and extra driving when instead one could proceed on Chorro to Murray, swing a right, do a loop-de-loop at the mid-block turnaround, and back to Chorro? The analysis provides us no clue how they arrived at this bizarre conclusion nor how they missed the obvious and more logical avoidance route. remain way below those of the 1980s. So what’s the rationale for changing the street designations to “arterial” vs. maintaining them as “collector?” As a planning commissioner and as a resident I had asked then-staff (in 1980s) how they could justify acquiescing to traffic volumes of 7,000 to 11,000 on these streets designated for 3,000 maximum, and why the city didn’t do whatever it must to achieve the lower number. Their replies were interesting and consistent: the city had no idea how to get traffic down to 3,000, but stating that number for these neighborhood residential streets and classifying the streets as classified represented an aspirational goal to accomplish that if they ever had the means or opportunity to do so. The mere fact of this inconsistency was viewed as a planning tool, they said, to keep alive the goal of making these streets more livable. It seems current staff have abandoned this future-oriented optimistic view of planning’s potential in favor of a bean counter’s approach to the inevitability of the future’s following present hypothetical projections. Which seems odd, does it not, given their simultaneous touting of modal shift’s potential for reshaping the future into something unfamiliar today? So I’d request you consider the following: • Is a projected possible increase in traffic sufficient grounds to change the General Plan’s classification of Lincoln and Chorro in a manner that gives up any pretense of city caring about reducing excessive traffic volumes on those neighborhood streets? • The street classification system is not a stand-alone planning policy, nor is it a hierarchically superior planning policy. It is intended to work in harmony with other portions of the General Plan. The General Plan (Housing and LUE) contains numerous policies for protecting neighborhoods from harms, one of which is excessive through traffic. The requested change appears to be in conflict with those more important General Plan neighborhood protection policies by giving priority only to counting traffic volumes over more inclusive neighborhood wellness policies. • The Broad Bike Boulevard is delineated in the new LUCE of the General Plan. Staff says creating the boulevard will violate the LUCE, thus the need for GP revisions. How can that be? Are we being told the LUCE was put together with such lack of care that it is internally inconsistent and thus so deficient it must be modified to achieve its own implementation? Is that a position the City Council really wants to endorse by making the General Plan changes staff requests? It seems as if staff is opening a large can of worms with this ill-thought-out request. • Is there no longer a place in our city’s planning for “aspirational planning” that leaves doors open as reminders/incentives/pressure-points to facilitate making a bad situation better when opportunity arises? Is not maintaining the present classification of Lincoln and Chorro a way for the city to say, “Even if this hypothetical volume increase actually happens, it remains our goal to find ways to reduce it to make this neighborhood more livable?” Is this not a good policy? • Does not making the requested classification change throw residents of these streets under the bus by removing policy-based pressure on the city to work towards getting excess cut-through traffic off these residential streets? Designating these neighborhood streets as arterials seems like a radical and very narrow act by the city. I feel strongly this requested General Plan change is not just bad policy, but an about face in the city’s stated commitments to neighborhood protection and wellness. When a requested policy change is in conflict with major portions of the General Plan, as this one appears to be, it should not be approved. Therefore I urge you to reject it outright. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt Aug. 31, 2018 Re: Anholm Bikeway Cycle Track Safety Dear Council Members, The cycle tracks the ATC keeps recommending are infrastructure that doesn’t fit into the neighborhood where they would be placed. They are like trying to pound multiple 1 square pegs into a single round hole. That should be obvious to all by now But they are also unsafe. Says a top international bike facility designer, “If someone advocates infrastructure like this and actually believes it is good, they probably shouldn't be advocating bicycle infrastructure.” The city tells cyclists it’s offering them a “safe, convenient, low-stress” ride. Viewing SLO’s plans against state-of-the art bike planning, my conclusion is the city offers cyclists a promise of safety and comfort without the reality. The “Broad/Chorro Bikeway” cycle-track-version is a mishmash of cycle tracks, cycles mixed with vehicles, cycles moving against the flow of traffic, dozens of unmarked intersections, and busy intersections with bikes forced into dangerous diagonal movements. None of this provides safety. Two-way cycle tracks, with some bikes going opposite the direction of adjacent vehicles and bikes, on Chorro from Lincoln to Mission and on Ramona from Broad to near Palomar, are the plan’s centerfold. On Broad, the track is southbound only. Northbound bikes remain mixed with traffic. The city thus confirms bikes mixed with vehicles on Broad are safe, so why build the disruptive southbound cycle track at all? Tracks are supposed to eliminate interactions with vehicles. These don’t. In fact, they create dozens of conflicts that don’t currently exist. Thirty-one driveways cross the cycle tracks, each, to quote the City of Davis Bike Plan, an “unsignalized intersection” dangerous to cyclists. 1 This multiple square pegs comment is based on the ATC’s refusal to understand how bikes actually traverse the neighborhood. The official story is bikes are going from downtown to some point on Foothill, and that these facilities will provide such a route. In fact, however, there are multiple destinations all of which are impossible to serve with a single route. These include Cal Poly (Chorro to Murray), Foothill shop area (Chorro to Foothill), elementary schools which given our fickle school board could be closed tomorrow (Broad to Foothill), and residential areas north of Foothill (take your pick). The Broad-Mission-Chorro routing will not serve most of this bike traffic. It seems to be intended to serve the wants of a handful of very vocal parents of elementary school children, about a half dozen of whom actually use this route, and all of whom will soon progress to a different school. + Davis, America’s biking capital, doesn’t do cycle tracks this way. Of 130 miles of Davis bikeways, about 1 mile is cycle track – used as short connectors between bikeways and schools, and on a stretch of major arterial without driveways. Like Davis, national engineering associations warn against cycle tracks crossed by driveways. Three “driveway” crossings are actually high-use intersections – two entries to the Foothill Plaza Shopping Center on Ramona (one for customers and one for heavy trucks), and the entrance to the Villages senior complex on Broad. Incredibly, the Villages entry isn’t on plans, suggesting the designer is oblivious to this major intersection. This is used daily by many cars, delivery trucks, Village vans and buses, as well as fire engines and ambulances which make multiple trips on a typical day responding to 911 calls. Add into that mix the fact many of the drivers may have slowed reaction time and failing eyesight and not be able to perceive bikes that are speeding downhill in the cycle track they must drive across. Two way cycle tracks are particularly hazardous because motorists aren’t expecting bikes going against traffic. This is bad at any driveway – imagine backing out with poor visibility --, but it’s disastrous at the shopping center’s exit on Ramona, notorious already for drivers looking left for on-coming vehicles and not seeing pedestrians in the crosswalk to their right. This dangerous spot is along the city’s ballyhooed “safe route to school” for elementary-school kids. A bike in a track, unlike one on the street, is physically trapped within the track so when danger suddenly appears, there’s little chance to evade it by swerving. Well-designed on-street tracks, in addition to being driveway-free, are buffered from vehicles by substantial things like a row of parked cars or a raised planter strip. Anholm’s will be immediately adjacent to moving traffic, the two separated by a curb. This will be uncomfortable for vehicles and cyclists moving in opposite directions and hardly looks like the “low-stress” ride the city promises. It’s a sure recipe for turning minor mishaps into serious accidents. National engineering organizations, as well as Davis, have enumerated places it’s appropriate to use cycle tracks, and those not. SLO’s plans hit zero for appropriateness and exemplify inappropriateness. Davis says cycle tracks are appropriate “on streets with parking lanes, high vehicle travel speeds, high vehicle traffic volume, high parking turnover, and/or high bicycle volumes.” In other words, in places it’s desirable and possible to sequester bikes from vehicles. Engineering associations like AASHTO and NACTO echo that. None of those conditions exist on Broad/Chorro. On the other hand, every authority I could find warns tracks with driveway crossings are dangerous. As are two-way cycle tracks in general. The Federal Highway Administration lists them among “practices to be avoided,” stating they “create hazardous conditions for bicyclists” and are “dangerous.” (Another FHWA “practice to be avoided” is a curb separating track from vehicles, because bikes hitting it may flip into the vehicular lane and cars hitting it may lose control. These Anholm cycle tracks are to have curbs.) International bike experts agree. The corporate blogger at Copenhagenize, an intercontinental bikeway design firm, says bi-directional cycle tracks haven’t been built in Denmark for more than two decades, because they were found unsafe. “The bi- directional cycle tracks we see in emerging bicycle cities can't possibly be put there by people who know what they're doing,” Copenhagenize writes. “If someone advocates infrastructure like this and actually believes it is good, they probably shouldn't be advocating bicycle infrastructure.” A Dutch cycling expert adds, “If you're trying to grow cycling in a place which does not already have a high cycling modal share, the infrastructure that you build needs to be better than this.” Deficient cycle track design is made worse by squeezing it onto streets too narrow for it, so safety compromises – narrowing of lanes and buffers -- are required for bikes and vehicles. On Chorro, the uneven pavement next to the curb with storm inlets that can flip bikes is counted in the cycle track’s minimum width, the buffer between track and moving vehicles is a half-foot narrower than minimum standard, as is the width of the parking lane on the opposite side of the street. This safety corner-cutting leaves two narrow 10-foot traffic lanes. On Broad, which is narrower than Chorro, the bike buffer is a foot narrower than minimum standard, as is the 7-foot parking lane -- so narrow many residents’ vehicles and tradesmen’s trucks don’t fit within it and will stick out into the alleged traffic lane. These “design” measurements are for the wide spots on these streets. Places on both streets are narrower and unspecified additional safety compromises will be made there, according to staff’s plan. Bike accident dynamics don’t support SLO’s plan for Anholm. Only a quarter of accidents happen mid-block, mainly at driveways, where SLO’s tracks make accidents more likely. The danger point – three-quarters of accidents – is at intersections. Cycle tracks do nothing to protect cyclists at intersections. SLO’s 2-way tracks appear to make intersections much more dangerous. At Chorro/Lincoln, riders from downtown would cut diagonally across this busy intersection to reach the track on the left side of Chorro. Since dominant bike traffic on Chorro is headed to Cal Poly, not to Broad, at Mission these riders will have to execute another mid-intersection diagonal to get back to the right side of the street. How is this back- and-forth on a busy street safe? At Broad/Ramona, cyclists coming towards Broad will have to exit their wrong-side-of- street track by cutting across all vehicular traffic turning at that intersection. This is nuts! Far from making biking safe for 7-year-olds, it assures their endangerment. None of this can possibly improve safety. For the past 5 years the police department has logged zero bike-vehicle accidents on Broad/Chorro (unless you count bike hit-and- runs on parked cars), so there’s zero safety rationale for this project. The cycle track project itself is inherently unsafe, and common sense says it must not proceed. So why is SLO spending $3 million for several blocks of retrograde dangerous bike infrastructure? The cycle track plans need to be declared dead. They are, and will remain, both inappropriate and dangerous on these streets. The fact that poorly informed people “want them” is not a reasonable basis to continue to pursue them. It’s time the council pulled the plug on this idea, and permanently removed cycle tracks from consideration on Anholm’s streets. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt