Week Without Driving 2024 will be held nationally, and in the Sacramento region, September 30 – October 6. Mark those dates on your calendar and prepare to participate!
The Sacramento website is https://weekwithoutdriving-sac.org/, and the hashtag for social media is #SacWWD.
A planning committee is meeting once a week to refine details and promotion, so expect to see that showing up shortly. SacRT will be offering free rides to participants on select days.
A slow week, so far as I know. SacMoves Coalition hosts an event calendar at https://sacmoves.org/events/.
Monday 26
Tuesday 27
A slower week, so far as I know. SacMoves Coalition hosts an event calendar at https://sacmoves.org/events/.
Tuesday 20
Wednesday 21
Friday 23
Sunday 25
Several transportation advocates attended the SacATC meeting in person, several people made eComments online, and hopefully others watched via Zoom.
3. Two Rivers Trail Phase III
This project is in the selection of alternatives and preliminary design phase. It will connect the existing trail segments of the Two Rivers Trail (the one on the south side of the American River, matching the American River Parkway Trail on the north side), except for crossings of the two UPRR (Union Pacific Railroad) tracks across the river, which are under discussion but without resolution. An additional crossing is Hwy 160, with uncertainty due to there being no active project design to replace one or both sides of the bridge, which are substandard, and will need to be replaced. Commission members asked a number of questions about the alternative alignments, particularly around the old city landfill. The project will report back when alternatives are selected.
4. Street Design Standards Amendment
This was just an update on the project, which is in early stage with some meetings held but several others yet to go (stakeholders, technical advisory, and public). Actual designs were not discussed, though public comment requested that the designs be innovative and cutting edge, and that outmoded or unsafe designs in the 2009 version be eliminated completely from the amendment.
5. Active Transportation Commission 2024 Annual Report
The presentation was on the 2023 report, with some questions about formatting, but the major questions having to do with whether to carry the 2023 recommendations, which sadly have not been acted on by city council or staff, into the 2024 report, or to modify them. The consensus seems to be there there should be a list of recommendations focused on safety issues, with safety for walkers and bicyclists being a higher priority than promotion of walking and bicycling (or course, they can’t really be separated). Recommendations that do not end up on the safety list might be on a separate list, not as prominent, but not lost. There was also discussion about organizing things by short-term and longer-term, but no consensus.
Recommendation 1: Increase Funding for Active Transportation Infrastructure Projects was agreed as the top priority on any list. Recommendation 6: Create a Sacramento Quick-Build Bikeways Program, also received a lot of support, however, not universal agreement.
Discussions will continue at the September and October, and perhaps November, SacATC meetings. A number of members of the SacATC were absent, quorum just barely made, but there seemed to be agreement that the conversation would continue from this point and not go back to the beginning, and the returning members would catch up on their own.
Of course the elephant in the room is that the city council accepted the report and recommendations, but has made no policy or funding decisions to implement the recommendations. The request to add funding to the 2024-2025 city budget for any of the recommendations was rejected by the city manager. Staff has moved forward in minor ways on some of the recommendations, using existing funding and staffing.
My favorite, Recommendation 9: Finalize the Construction Detour Policy, is stalled out in Public Works, and it is not clear when or if it will ever see the light of day. Adherence to best practices for ADA accommodation and meeting PROWAG guidelines is not popular in the regressive Public Works Department.
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.
The agenda includes three main items:
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.
I’ve written before that streets should be planned from the outside in. Nearly every street I travel and nearly every plan I see for changing street width allocation clearly shows that the reverse is what was built, and what is planned.
There are a number of streets where center turn lanes are provided in blocks where there are few to no driveways. S Street near where I live is just one example. Many blocks have few to no driveways, yet the center turn lane exists all the way from 3rd Street to Alhambra Blvd. Could the street width be better used? You bet.
The most egregious example, however, is the Broadway Complete Streets project. I’ve written quite a number of posts, about the ways in which the project is successful, and the ways in which is it not. The project is such a disappointment to all the transportation advocates I talk to. Why?
Broadway was planned from the inside out. A center turn lane, all the way, whether needed or not. I’ll point out the expression, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, Ralph Waldo Emerson, from the essay Self-Reliance“. Next, two motor vehicle lanes, one each way (which is an improvement over two each way before the project). The lanes are overly wide, 11 feet when they could have been 10 feet (not less than 10, because it is a bus route). Next, traditional bike lanes, mostly five feet wide but sometimes six, sometimes with a painted buffer (no vertical delineators), sometimes without. The bike lanes could have been parking protected, but they were not. They could have been wider, so that two bicyclists could safely pass each other, and accommodate cargo bikes and three-wheeled bikes. They were not. There is a short one block section between 15th Street and 16th Street where these a curb-protected bikeway. But nowhere else.
Then comes the sidewalks. The city apparently had a design policy to not touch the sidewalks, which then engenders ADA requirements, which are somewhat expensive to meet (though a small fraction of the entire project). But they did touch the sidewalks in places, and in each of these places, the sidewalks are narrower than they were before the project. In several locations, the sidewalks do not even meet ADA or PROWAG guidelines. The city has claimed that since PROWAG has not been adopted by FHWA, the requirements don’t apply to the city. In other words, go ahead and sue us, but we aren’t going to do the right thing. That is what city staff said when challenged about this.
Has the city learned its lesson? No. The two additional segments of Broadway to the east have exactly the same design.
The city’s stated objective for this project was to slow and reduce motor vehicle traffic so that people would stop for businesses along the street, increasing economic vitality. Broadway has real problems currently, as you can see by traveling along the corridor. A lot of empty buildings, a lot of parking lots, a lot of low value fast food joints. But is also has a number of great locally owned businesses, many of which were beginning to fail due to the street design and the pandemic. I admire the city’s intent, but mourn their failure to create a street than will accomplish that.
An article in the SacBee today reports that a bicyclist died when he/she swerved into the path of a motor vehicle. The article parrots the CHP spokesman, that the bicyclist swerved. No doubt the uninjured driver would say that. The bicyclist is dead and has nothing to say, so the CHP takes the word of the driver.
Note that no crash investigation has been conducted by CHP. Crash investigations take weeks, and require gathering of detailed information about the point of collision, and the direction of movement of the bicyclist and driver at the time of collision, and more information about the victim and perpetrator. But without the results of an investigation, the CHP just assumes that the bicyclist is at fault and the driver is innocent. This is victim blaming of the first order. Of course this is standard procedure for CHP, where almost every officer thinks that every bicyclist crash is the fault of the bicyclist, without evidence to support that assumption. CHP is not a safety-oriented agency, they are a victim-blaming agency. No surprise.
What is a surprise is that the SacBee would parrot the CHP’s misinformation about the crash. News media does not exist to reprint agency press releases. It should exist to question what agencies say, particularly when the agency expresses certainty about a crash that has not received an incident investigation. Please do better, SacBee. Report the facts that are known, not CHP speculation.
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.
Monday 12
Tuesday 13
Wednesday 14
Thursday 15
Friday 16
Consent Calendar items
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.
Street design and land use are intimately connected. Street design should support surrounding land use (not land use somewhere else), and land use should take advantage of the best characteristics of streets. But in most of Sacramento, street design and land use do not support each other.
At the regional level, SACOG (Sacramento Area Council of Governments) has transportation authority but does not have land use authority. They must rely on encouragement of local governments to implement better land use, and is able to use transportation investments to a small degree to support better land use. But the City of Sacramento does have both transportation and land use authority, and could and should be planning the two in unison to accomplish a more sustainable and livable built environment.
Many of our streets are designed to allow people to pass through at high speed, not to stop for living. In some cases, this is an historical artifact because some of our major streets were at one time state highways. But other streets were designed in the same way in more recent times. The city has allowed and encouraged business development along these former highways, with more driveways, more parking, more intersections, more congestion that reduces transit effectiveness, and fewer safe crossings. At the same time, the city has widened roads and widened lanes, creating or maintaining high speed limits which are completely incompatible with the function of streets as places, or as Strong Towns puts it, places for building wealth.
The roadways which try to combine the functions of high speed and throughput with local productivity are called ‘stroads’, a street/road combination. These roadways fail at both. They must be healed by conversion to either streets or roads.
Stroad to Road
In order to bring street design and land use into alignment, the city must either redesign these stroads (a street/road hybrid) toward road function by:
Stroad to Street
Or, redesign these stroads toward street function by:
In most cases it is more cost effective to change a stroad to a street, but both transformations are possible and necessary. We need fewer roads and more streets in our transportation system.
Land Use
An effective land use pattern offers the opportunities of daily life (jobs, businesses, dining, entertainment, groceries and shopping) within walking or bicycling distance of home. In Sacramento, the midtown section of the central city already offers this type of land use, because it was developed before the primitive concept of zoning pushed all uses further away. A few other places in Sacramento offer widely scattered examples of such land use.
Relatively few trips outside the neighborhood would be necessary if we had this type of mixed use and diverse land use. Though both land use and streets in midtown could be even better, it is an example which other neighborhoods could emulate. Of course streets must support this land use, with slow speeds which do not endanger people walking and bicycling, and where parking is sufficient but not in excess.
The city should support small businesses in every reasonable way. It need not prohibit larger businesses, but let them succeed or not on their own, without promotion or subsidy from the city.
Small parcels, often called fine-grained development, best support a diversity of housing types and businesses. The city should preserve small parcels, prohibiting consolidation except under compelling public interest, and where large parcels exist, consider purchase, division into small parcels, and sale to small scale infill developers.
Street and Land Use Supporting Each Other
Below is a photo of K Street in midtown Sacramento. The street design, one lane each way, low volume and low speed, temporary curb extensions to calm traffic, painted crosswalks, some on-street parking but reduced to increase walker safety. Of course it could be even better. The land use, a mix of storefront retail and housing, in turn supports good road design. This is a street. This is a place where people want to spend time, and spend money, and feel welcome.
Street and Land Use Working Against Each Other
Below is a photo of Freeport Blvd at the intersection with Fruitridge Rd in south Sacramento. The street is designed for high speed travel, accommodating high volumes of motor vehicles. Bike lanes are present in some places, but dropped when necessary to promote motor vehicle flow. Dual left turn lanes endanger everyone on the road, and right turn lanes present a hazard to bicyclists. The crosswalk has faded to near invisibility. And the land use reflects those problems. Fast food businesses oriented to drivers and excluding walkers and bicyclists. A blank fence to try to isolate residences from the roadway, but of course it does not reduce exposure to noise and air pollution. Parking lots facing the street rather than storefronts. This is not a place where people feel welcome.
Freeport is NOT the worst stroad in town, by any means, but it is typical. Does the roadway encourage poor land use? Yes. Does the land use encourage the poorly designed roadway? Yes.
Getting Around Sacramento 