Category: Strong SacTown

Park(ing) Day, 2025-09-20

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Strong SacTown will again be hosting a Park(ing) Day event on Saturday, September 20, 2025. The location will be 20th Street & L Street, adjacent to the Midtown Farmers Market, and the time 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. The location should attract curious people from the farmers market, as well as passerbys. You can sign up with Strong SacTown at https://bit.ly/sstparkingday2025 (the link in the newsletter and meeting slide below is malformed, so use this one) to help with planning and hosting on the day, including setup and breakdown. Whether you stop by or get involved, don’t miss it!

The international Park(ing) Day website provides background and history about the events. Note that Sacramento’s day is Saturday, September 20, not Friday, September 19. It also provides a description of the event:

“On Saturday, September 20, Strong SacTown is hosting Park(ing) Day, a community celebration where we reimagine Sacramento’s streets. We’ll highlight the new daylighting law (AB 413), invite neighbors to brainstorm how we can use these reclaimed spaces, and enjoy fun activities like bike tune-ups, games, and a mini bike lot. This is a chance to spark creativity around how Sacramento can use daylighted corners for seating, greening, and gathering.”

Note that in addition to Park(ing) Day, the Midtown Farmers Market runs 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM, and the Sacramento Porch Fest in midtown runs 12:00 noon to 10:00 PM, all in this most livable neighborhood of Sacramento.

Strong SacTown: Things that work: traffic posts

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Things That Work: Traffic Posts is the eighth post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

“You don’t often hear news about the crashes that didn’t happen. Today we’d like to highlight something already making real-world safety impacts in Sacramento: traffic posts (aka. delineators) on 15th & 16th Streets in Downtown. These traffic posts reduce the speed of cars (and severity of injuries) as well as channelize traffic – stopping cars from changing lanes at the crosswalk and potentially striking pedestrians who have started crossing.

Strong SacTown Street Design: Active Street Typology

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Active Street Typology is the seventh post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

“Active Streets are similar to Local Streets, but with additional features to encourage and prioritize active transportation including biking, rolling, and walking. Well-planned Active Streets form a cohesive network of safe, convenient, and direct connections to local destinations and between neighborhoods. Low vehicle volumes and speeds are an essential characteristic of Active Streets, and the typology shares many facets of the bicycle boulevard or neighborhood greenway street types found in other jurisdictions.”

Park(ing) Day in Sacramento on September 21

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Park(ing) Day, is an international and local event: “Park(ing) day is a global, public, participatory project where people across the world temporarily repurpose curbside parking spaces and convert them into public parks and social spaces to advocate for safer, greener, and more equitable streets for people.”

Strong SacTown, the affiliate or ‘local conversation’ of the Strong Towns organization, and SABA, are sponsoring a Park(ing) Day event on Saturday, September 21, from 11:00am to 2:00pm. The location will be repurposed parking spaces at 1607 10th Street, Sacramento, in front of Cafe Xocolatl, which is supporting the event.

The Park(ing) Day website (https://www.myparkingday.org) map shows a second location in Sacramento, on 20th Street between J and K streets, but doesn’t have information about the date and time or sponsor. This may be a carryover from 2023 when there was an event on 20th Street.

Strong SacTown Street Design: Local Street Typology

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Local Street Typology is the sixth post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

“Local Streets are an extension of the adjacent land uses and provide space for people to socialize, play, and even loiter, and will be designed and managed as places primarily for people. People are likely to spend most of their time in or near Local Streets, since these are where to find most destinations. As such, it should feel natural and comfortable to dwell in or stroll through a Local Street. Parents should feel comfortable letting their kids play unsupervised, and noise levels are low enough to hold a conversation.”

Strong SacTown Street Design: Modal Filters

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Modal Filters is the fifth post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

“Also known as traffic diverters, or permeable filters, modal filters hold the key to bringing back the pre-1920 sense that streets are for everybody and can be a shared space where all traffic can safely and slowly mix. They do this by reducing the number of cars on a given street or in a neighborhood via bollards or other physical barriers.”

diagram showing the improved safety of streets in the northeast quadrant of the central city

Strong SacTown Street Design: Street Typologies Overview

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The fourth post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

To help support the design or redesign of stroads into either streets or roads, and to enhance the comfort and safety for all road users, we recommend a new, simplified street typology:

In lieu of Sacramento’s current seven typologies, ours comprises only four: Local Street, Active Street, Transit Street, and Road.

  1. Local streets are the core of our street network, serving a built environment with multiple uses where most of the home, work, commercial and social needs of people are within walking or short bicycling distance. Motor vehicles are guests, safety is primary, and economic and social vibrancy are promoted. Some local streets may have no private motor vehicles traffic at all, or such use be limited to certain times of day. A majority of roadways in the city should be local streets. Local streets will have a maximum design speed of 20 mph.
  2. Active streets have features that allow bicyclists and mobility device users to travel at somewhat higher speeds over somewhat longer distances. However, the local street function is not compromised. Active streets will have a maximum design speed of 20 mph.
  3. Transit Streets have features that allow effective transit use including higher frequency buses, streetcars and possibly light rail. However, the local street function is not compromised. Transit streets will have a maximum design speed of 20mph for streets with transit priority and 30 mph for exclusively transit.
  4. Roads are designed to allow longer distance travel at somewhat higher speeds, by transit and private motor vehicles. The safety of all users is still paramount. Roads should be a minor component of the transportation network, occurring at intervals of one to two miles. Roads will have a maximum design speed of 30 mph.
Street Typologies Overview

Strong SacTown Street Design: Lane Widths

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The third post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

Narrower lanes are generally correlated with slower speeds, reduced collisions, and safer streets. Our recommendations:Lane widths instituted as maximums (rather than minimums) Maximum 10 feet for any streets 30+ mph (except limited cases) Increased flexibility for streets designed for 25 mph or lowerOver 80% of the fatalities and serious injuries on Sacramento roadways happen on streets signed between 30 mph and 45 mph. Taking a serious approach to Vision Zero will mean addressing these higher-speed, higher-volume roads. Both a reclassification of these roads (discussed later) and redesign of the current geometry to appropriate speeds is crucial. 

Lane Widths – Strong SacTown
Lane Widths

The Importance of Street Design

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The second post by Strong SacTown to improve and promote the City of Sacramento update to its Street Design Standards. Other posts at tag: street design standards.

Over time, the major use of our streets and public right of way has shifted: from pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages, to streetcars and bicycles, and — over the last several decades — to ever larger private vehicles. In designing our streets for vehicle throughput, our network of roads has become a transitional space focused on getting as many cars from Point A to Point B as fast as possible. This means dedicating an ever increasing amount of space to travel and parking lanes, with only the space left over from vehicle use — if any — allocated to people: pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit.

The Importance of Street Design – Strong SacTown

The Importance of Street Design