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.”
The Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC) meets today, August 15, 2024 at 5:30 PM. in city council chambers, 915 I St. It can be viewed online by going to the city meetings page, selecting SacATC livestream. Comments are only available in-person, via the meetings page eComment, or ahead of time to the city clerk, if eComment is not working. In-person comments are the most effective.
I encourage everyone to attend in person, or watch online, and to submit comments. Recently, public participation has increased, but far too few citizens are engaged. Though the commission is not powerful, it is one of the few ways the public has of engaging the city on the public health crisis that is the epidemic of traffic violence in the city.
At the June 11 city council meeting at which the 2024-2025 budget was adopted, seven of the council members spoke strongly about the need to address safety on the city’s streets, acknowledging that the city leads California as the most deadly for roadway users. But no modification was made to the budget to reflect that priority, and the city manager refused to make any changes to the budget to fund street safety.
In the two months since that council meeting, nothing has shown up on the council agenda to move forward on street safety, nothing has shown up to allocate funds, except some minor grant applications.
The city has long had a policy that it does not fund street safety projects, except for the required grant matches. Other than grant matches, no city general funds are expended to make our streets safer. The city certainly has been successful in getting some grants, but also has not been competitive on many others.
The Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC) made a recommendation in their annual report to allocate $10M to safety projects. Council members spoke in support of the idea, but no action was taken to fund those ideas.
We have an epidemic of traffic violence in the city. Yet the city is doing almost nothing to address that. Walkers, bicyclists, drivers and passengers are all dying in horrible numbers. What is the city doing in response? Submitting grant applications and hoping for the best. This is unacceptable.
The council must take this public health crisis seriously, and allocate funds to start solving it. It must also stand up to the city manager, who does not believe in spending money on street safety. The city manager runs the city according to his own whims, and rarely follows the direction of council on anything. The council must either stand up to, or fire, the city manager. So long as he is in the position, the city will not move forward on saving the lives of vulnerable roadway users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For very rich people, who can afford to buy a new car every one or two years, a car is probably not an albatross. But for everyone else, who cannot buy a new car as often, or who can never buy a new car, they are an albatross.
A car loses about 20% of its value just being driving off the car lot, and about 15% per year thereafter. What other major investment do people make that loses value so rapidly? If you own a vehicle and claim it as a work vehicle, you can deduct this depreciation. For individuals, no such luck.
People focus on the cost of gas, pushing from their mind all the other ongoing expenses of registration, taxes, routine maintenance. But gas is only about half of the cost of keeping a car.
Cars always break down more frequently than expected, and always cost more to repair than expected. For lower income people, these unplanned breakdowns often push them over the edge.
The availability of cars and the roadways built specifically to support them (only in part paid for by gas taxes), encourages people to work and live further apart. But the CNT H+T Index says the real cost of decisions about housing and work are the sum of housing and transportation. The further away from everything one lives the less housing costs, but the more transportation costs. The ‘drive until you qualify’ expression focuses on housing costs and ignores transportation costs, but transportation is a significant portion.
Cars crash, whether it is the driver’s fault or someone else’s, the damage occurs. We’ve all seen crash damage that doesn’t get repaired because the cost of repair is more than insurance pays out, even if you have insurance, and many people don’t.
Cars fall apart. Stand on a corner and you will hear cars with loose wheel nuts rattling, loose exhausts rattling or making unwanted noise (not talking people who intentionally make their cars louder), hubcaps and trim and bumpers long gone. Older cars are belching exhaust, older cars are barely making it up hills, and many can’t even go on the freeway because they can’t keep up.
When cars are at the end of their life, they are a piece of junk for which there is no profitable recycling. If you want your car recycled, it is going to cost you money. Or you can let it sit in your front yard, or backyard, or garage, or the street in front of your house, as many do, rusting away and leaking toxic fluids. It is a liability to you and to society.
People who drive cars are routinely late because what they plan in their mind is a free-flowing trip, but that is not what usually happens. So they are late, and they drive too fast to try to make up for it. See ‘cars crash’ above. This is probably worst for school drop-off and pick-up.
Because cars allow people to travel longer distances to lower priced (and usually but not always lower quality) stores, locally owned businesses disappear, and we are left with chain stores and big box stores. One of the reasons restaurants and bars and coffee shops and entertainment are scarce in the suburbs is that many people drive to the central city, where such things are available. Good business for those of us who live in the central city, but bad for the suburbs. When was the last time you saw a quality locally-owned coffee shop in the suburbs?
When I view areas where the unhoused are living in their vehicles, I am amazed at some of the high-end vehicles I see there. Whether they are still running or permanently broken down, I don’t know. But every instance makes me wonder if buying a vehicle they could not afford, payments and maintenance, is what pushed them over the edge, into homelessness.
What have I forgotten? You people out there who own cars but wish you didn’t can add to the list in comments.
Additional posts on Broadway Complete Streets are available at category ‘Broadway Complete Streets‘.
The section of Broadway from just west of 3rd Street to 19th Street has been repaved, and marked for striping, but no striping has been done yet. The section from 21st St to 24th Street has been ground down in preparation for paving, but no paving has occurred.
There are construction vertical delineators scattered all over the street, along with delineator bases without the vertical. Most of the delineators were placed in what will be the bike lane, not in what will be the bike lane buffer. Presumably the construction company wishes to keep them further away from motor vehicles, which is sort of understandable since more than one-third of the delineators have been hit by drivers.
I’ll post again when there is actual striping installed.
I have attended several SACOG board and committee meetings over the last two months, and seen the pushback that smaller cities and more rural areas are providing to the innovations of the 2025 Blueprint, in particular Scenario 3 which promotes infill rather than greenfield development. I will have more to say about this in the future, but for now, want to address the question of why these areas have such a strong voice in SACOG. It is the very structure of the Board of Directors, to give every member one vote, not matter the size of the population they represent. This is called one-member/one-vote.
The SACOG Mission and Governance page provide information about the structure and voting of the board. The table below (pdf, xlsx) shows the 31 voting members, the votes assigned to them, the population of the entity, and the votes that would be allocated if votes were population weighted, rather than one-member/one-vote. Caveats: I have not excluded the population of the Lake Tahoe basin in Placer and El Dorado counties, which are not in the SACOG region, because it is difficult to calculate, and not that significant. County supervisors represent all the citizens of a county, whether they are in unincorporated county or within a city. However, in looking a government bodies, I think it is useful to look at unincorporated population, and have used it in the table. County supervisors often seem to forget that they represent the entire county. All figures are from the 2020 census.
There are dozens of striking insights from this table, but I’ll focus on four.
In Sacramento County, the City of Isleton has 794 citizens, which is less than 0.1% of the county, and 0.1% of the region. That means the member representing Isleton has about 16 times the power of the member representing Elk Grove. Other counties have similar disparate representation.
In the region, Sacramento County has 61.5% of the population, yet only 35.5% of the vote, while Yuba County has 3.2% of the population, yet 9.7% of the vote. Sacramento County has 20 times the population of Yuba County, yet only 3-1/2 times the vote.
If Sacramento County were not assigned three voting members, and City of Sacramento two voting member, the disparity between population and voting would be even more prominent. This higher number of voting members is meant to compensate, in a minor way, for the egregious imbalance in representation that would otherwise result.
The town of Loomis, not a city, has one member, with a population of 6,836. In Sacramento County, the ‘towns’ (CDPs, census designated places) have far larger populations, yet no representation except through the county: Arden-Arcade 94,659, Carmichael 79,793, North Highlands 49,327, Orangevale 35,569, Fair Oaks 32,514, and several smaller CDPs. How did Loomis get this seat?
I am a believer in democracy. I realize that many people consider us a republic rather than a democracy, but other than the US Senate, we make the effort at all levels of government to approach as closely as possible the democratic ideal of one-person/one-vote. Yet we have entities such as SACOG (Sacramento Area Council of Governments) that, by using one-member/one-vote, are as far from representative of the people as can be.
So when you wonder, why do small cities and rural areas have such a large voice in transportation funding and sustainable communities strategies (the SCS part of the Blueprint), and why we continue to promote greenfield development in the region when we know that greenfield equals climate disaster, please refer back to this governance model.
The City of Sacramento is hosting a webinar on the draft Work Zone and Event Detour Policy Update, tomorrow, January 24, 6:00PM. You can register for the Zoom webinar here (registration is not available on the Work Zone webpage).
With two posts today on construction zone violations, and hundreds of reports to 311, and a series of posts on the work zone policy, I hope that you will agree with me that this is a critical issue for everyone who walks or bicycles in the city (or drives, for that matter), and will attend this webinar. This will probably be the last chance for public education and input before the policy goes to city council, perhaps in February.
The two most important steps to improve the draft policy are:
establish a monitoring program which requires city staff (or contracted services) to monitor construction projects of more than one day with a visit at the beginning of the project, and at reasonable intervals thereafter
For other improvements to the policy that could be made, please see previous posts in category ‘Work Zones‘.
I participated in a Strong Towns Crash Analysis Studio on Thursday. I highly recommend these sessions, and will have much more to say about them in the future. One of the presenters shared the diagram below to illustrate what could be done with an over-wide street in Carlsbad, California, the scene of a bicyclist fatality.
Residential Neighborhood Collector Parallel Parking One Side
The diagram is from Better Town Toolkit, and I am quite pleased to find this website. It has design guidance for a variety of places, best practices, and case studies. “Our goal is to help you improve the prosperity, sustainability and quality of life in your community by providing you with the best practices for design and development in your area.” It is sponsored by Regional Plan Association in New York. I am unable to find this exact diagram on their website, but a similar one is L56.
Sacramento is full of over-wide streets. Of course pulling in the curb line and permanently narrowing the vehicle portion of the roadway is the best solution, but very expensive for moving drain inlets an re-pouring curbs. I’ve suggested using diagonal parking to narrow the travel way on slow, low-traffic streets: diagonal parking. The diagram shows another good solution for streets with attached sidewalks, no sidewalk buffer or planting strip. Plant trees in the parking lanes to narrow the roadway, retain parking on one side only, and make a two-way street with narrow lanes (9 foot?). The curb line does not necessarily need to be moved at all, and drain inlets may not need to be moved, so the project would be much less expensive than a street redesign.
There are many streets on which parking utilization is low, in fact, streets empty of parking have none of the traffic calming effect that parking can have. One lane of parking would be sufficient on many streets, and would disourage excess car ownership and long-term storage of cars on the street. Parking has benefits, but only if there is high utilization and turnover. Streets are not a place for long-term storage of private property.
Take a look at the website and let me know what your favorite diagram or page is.
Getting Around Sacramento 