SacMoves Coalition hosts an event calendar at https://sacmoves.org/events/, which is maintained by STAR (Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders) and Getting Around Sacramento.
Monday 04
Sacramento Climate Coalition, 6:00 PM, To participate in this monthly meeting, please email info@sacclimate.org to be added to the list.
Note: Don’t expect this to be a regular feature. I’ll do it when I can. Please see the calendar maintained by SacMoves Coalition, at https://sacmoves.org/events/.
Monday 16
Tuesday 17
Sacramento City Council meeting, 5:00 PM, likely will address emergency declaration for road safety introduced by Caity Maple, Mayor Darrell Steinberg, and Karina Talamantes; not noted on the agenda as of 2024-09-15
Sunday Streets SF: Mission Ciclovia, 11:00AM to 4:00PM (no, not Sacramento region, but if you’ve never experienced the joy of an open streets event, highly recommended; entirely accessible by train and transit; bring your bike!)
Note: Don’t expect this to be a regular feature. I’ll do it when I can. SacMoves Coalition hosts an event calendar at https://sacmoves.org/events/. Added note about consent calendars, below.
All of the agency agendas have items on a consent calendar or consent agenda, items which are routine continuations of decisions already made, or which are not expected to generate any controversy or public discussion. Any council/board/commission member may request that an agenda item be pulled from the consent calendar for discussion. Sometimes this is just so that they can make a statement of support, and sometimes it is because they wish the governing body to really discuss the item. It is not unusual for an item that really deserves discussion to be snuck by on the consent agenda, but at the same time, discussion of every single item would lead to interminable meetings. The consent calendar does serve a useful purpose.
The public may comment on any item on the consent calendar. However, unless the item has been pulled for discussion, comment is unlikely to change the outcome. The consent calendar is passed en-masse, not item by item. It is often not known until the consent calendar comes up whether or not a particular item may be pulled, so if you do wish to comment, you must submit a speaker card for that item ahead of time (if in person) or a comment beforehand on whatever schedule and mechanism the entity requires.
I posted to Instagram about this, but it deserves amplification. “The Sacramento Bee had an article today that provided in-depth information about the death of a person crossing San Juan Rd in North Natomas. It included information about the dangerous roadway and lack of crosswalks and about the individual and family of the person killed. This is the kind of crash reporting we need to raise awareness and get the city to allocate resources to save lives.”
intersection of San Juan Rd and Airport Rd in North Natomas, Sacramento
I have worked off and on doing bicyclist education in North Natomas, and therefore crossed through this intersection many times, mostly bicycling but occasionally walking. It is not a safe intersection, for anyone.
Walking
The lack of crosswalks is obvious. The posted speed limit is 40 mph, but common practice and the design of the road sets that as a minimum rather than maximum. Knowing that this is a dangerous situation, the city has cross-hatched out the area from Azevado Drive to Airport Road on the north side, narrowing the roadway to one lane, but drivers routinely use this area for both travel and turning. Westbound drivers coming down off the overpass over I-80 accelerate to 60 mph. People walk across San Juan here. The city has decided to leave them to fate, and in this case the fate was death. A crosswalk without any additional protection would not be appropriate given the high speed traffic. It would require, at the least, a RRFB (rectangular rapid flashing beacon), which is a sign with flashing lights activated by the person wanting to cross. But given actual speed, it probably would need additional protection. Fixing poorly designed roadways is expensive, but so are lives.
There is a crosswalk over Airport Road, but given the wide-open design of the intersection, it is meaningless. Drivers turning from San Juan Road are unlikely to notice it. Drivers southbound on Airport Road generally stop over or beyond the crosswalk, because they need the visibility, and as much head start on the dangerous turn as possible. I know this from extensive observation.
Bicycling
Some people would say “but it has bike lanes”. Not really. Eastbound, motor vehicles turning onto Airport Road cross over the bike lanes at many points, regardless of any paint on the ground. If a person stayed in the bike lane, they would be exposing themselves to high speed traffic for along distance. Hug the curb to be further from motor vehicles, or use the bike lane so that you are more visible? It is a devils choice, forced by road design. West of Airport Road, the bike lane is missing for a distance, implying to drivers that they have the right-of-way over bicyclists. Eastbound, the bike lane is mostly continuous, except for the intersection itself (why?), but it is full of debris from construction traffic and car parts. To my knowledge, the city has never swept this bike lane.
It is difficult many times of the day to turn east from Airport Road to San Juan Road. High speed traffic, high volume at certain times, does not slow in the least in this area, and there is no signing to indicate they should.
Regular Class 2 bike lanes should be illegal on roadways posted over 35 mph. This road was mis-designed from the beginning. I don’t know whether the city later added bike lanes, though it is probably so given all the striping on San Juan to the east. The bike lanes did not make it safer for bicyclists.
Journalism
News media in general does a very poor job of reporting on traffic crashes, particularly when the victim is a walker or bicyclist. The initial news item parrots the law enforcement statement. Unless waiting for ‘notification of family’, the victim’s name is given, but the driver’s name never is. This is a strange inversion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, making the driver innocent and the victim guilty. As I have stated many times before, law enforcement personnel have no training in analyzing the ways in which roadway design contributes, if not causes, traffic crashes. But they have a lot of ideas, not based in any research or training, that they are too happy to relay. One that will ring home with bicyclists is the repeated phrase ‘they weren’t wearing a helmet’, as though wearing a helmet protects against being hit by a driver traveling over the speed limit (they almost all are) or well over the speed limit, as is likely in this case.
A good summary of the issue is by SafeTREC, Media Narratives of Pedestrian and Bicyclist-Involved Crashes. If you want more, simply search the Internet for ‘poor journalism on traffic crashes’ or similar terms. Angie Schmitt wrote an entire book, Right-of-Way, about this issue and others. What about the next reporting? There usually isn’t any. The incident is never mentioned again. Law enforcement contributes to this by making sure that the incident report is delayed for weeks or months after the crash. In California, there is the common practice of law enforcement claiming that incident reports can never be released to anyone but immediate family. This is no backed up by state law, but it is common practice. So even when the incident report is completed, the public is unlikely to ever know the facts of the crash. All the public ever knows is the untrained, biased speculation of the law enforcement officer on the scene. The cynic in me can only see this as an intention on the part of law enforcement to protect drives and keep the public in the dark about traffic violence.
So, it was a wonderful breath of fresh air to read the Sacramento Bee article by Ariane Lange: A father died crossing a dangerous Sacramento road. His 13-year-old son was watching. The article went into depth about the person who was killed, and his family. It looked at the dangerous design of the road, and the fact that the city rarely fixes dangerous roads except with state or federal grants, not its own money. It talked about Vision Zero and the high injury network, of which San Juan Road is one, though in part due to problems further east. It talks about the statistics for death at various vehicle speeds, including 50% death at 40 mph (though it is very unlikely the driver was going that slow).
Traffic violence is pervasive in Sacramento, with the highest rate of fatal crashes in the state. The usual media reporting glosses over this, basically selling the story that if it wasn’t someone you know, it wasn’t that important. But it is always important, and sooner or later it will be someone you know, or you. These are real people with real lives, and real families and friends, and their death leaves a huge hole, whether they are homeless or not.
Thank you, Ariane, for telling the real story behind the death.
Update: I have decided that, for now, I’m only going to follow back transportation organizations and agencies. My concern is that if I start following individuals, my feed will become overwhelming for the limited time I have for Instagram.
As an experiment, I have created an Instagram account for Getting Around Sacramento. I started using Instagram for the Week Without Driving Sacramento campaign last year, on the encouragement of one of the program partners, SABA, which has an active Instagram. I maintain the WWD Sac website on behalf of Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (which does not so far have Instagram). We gained some engagement, but not much participation in Week Without Driving. It was definitely a learning curve for me.
The main reason for my interest in using Instagram for Getting Around Sacramento is not promoting my posts, but linking to events sponsored by other organizations and agencies, which are important but not necessarily worth a separate blog post.
I stopped using Facebook years ago because there was little of import there, and stopped using Twitter/X two years ago because it had become toxic under the regime of Elon Musk. I’ve looked at Mastodon, but the most logical server is a bay area server, and haven’t found one relevant to the geography and mission of Getting Around Sac.
A media icon for Instagram has been added to the top of the sidebar.
There is much to write about transportation, and housing, in the Sacramento region. I keep track of blog post ideas in a ToDo application called OmniFocus. The list gets longer rather than shorter. Eight days since my last post, and seven days before that. Twenty-three items are on the list. Yow!
I also write for Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (STAR) and am now the lead person for the new SacMoves Coalition website. And Week Without Driving Sacramento, my Granite Chief Wilderness blog (though only during Sierra backpacking season), and even my personal blog, which is much neglected. I enjoy writing for all of these blogs, not to mention writing in my personal journal, which I get to a few times a week. But there are a lot of other things in my life besides writing. I walk and bicycle, I dance, mostly contra dancing in the bay area, I go to plays, in Sacramento and San Francisco, I read books (though too little), I watch movies, mostly at home on my computer, I go often to the grocery store (being car free, I walk or bicycle, and so do more frequent trips rather than big shopping trips), I attend both agency meetings and advocacy group meetings, I go to coffee shops to write and read and socialize, and I hang out with my neighborhood cats on my porch. And a lot of other things.
I’m not apologizing for the gaps between posts, or for not writing about what you want to hear about. But I do want to write about what interests or concerns you. So let me know. You can comment on the blog, or email me at allisondan52@gmail.com. If you would like to contribute yourself, let me know what your idea is and I’ll work with you. If you’ve been reading, you will know that I support active transportation and transit, not motor vehicles, and I support housing, of all types and price points. If that is not your passion, look elsewhere, because there are still plenty of voices for cars, and parking, and exclusionary zoning.
I’m soon to create two posts that refer to articles in the SacBee, so it seems like a good time to express my frustration with the SacBee firewall. The Bee does make a few articles available to the public, but most require a subscription to view. When I link to a SacBee article, I know that many of my readers will not be able to access that article, because they don’t have a subscription to the Bee. That is frustrating to me, and frustrating to my readers.
The SacBee app works reasonably well, but SacBee links don’t open in the app, you have to go to the app and search for what you want. The search engine is weak. Articles that have been posted recently are often not in Latest News or More latest news. Though it isn’t clear how long articles are retained in the app, a search for an older article may (or may not) bring up the print edition facsimile, and the article of interest may or may not be in that issue.
The web version of the SacBee is quite problematic. You can log into your account, but it will make you log in again within a few day. If you do have a subscription, it will often claim you don’t, and make you go though the whole log in process again. I had a subscription for a while, and tried to use the web interface. I quickly gave up and dropped my subscription. Which was another problem. It took me a deep dive into account management, and several tries, to drop my subscription.
Of course the Bee offers incentives pretty regularly. Free for a period of time, of a price far below subscription for a period of time, but trying to drop the subscription after these incentive periods is quite frustrating. I just tried to load the subscription page in the web interface, and after 15 minutes, the page is still loading. It loads in the app, however. Month subscriptions are $15.99 per month. That seems like a whole lot of money for a newspaper that most repeats national new sources, which I can get many other places, or rewrites articles from CalMatters, and has little real local journalism outside sports. But then, just when I’m about to give up completely, a useful article pops up.
What I want from the Bee is an option to buy an article. For personal, non-commercial use, to read or excerpt a small portion of the article, maybe 50 cents per article. If I want to share the entire article on my non-commercial blog, maybe $2. The Bee knows that its readers want this sort of payment by article, but it has resisted offering this. I don’t know why. It is a chance to make more money off of its journalism. Talking to my friends about the Bee, very few of them subscribe, so the Bee is missing all of the income from these people, and additional income it might make from me.
These are modern times. Why can’t the SacBee offer per article payments? Why can’t the Bee make a website that works?
Getting Around Sacramento 