The Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC) on Thursday, January 18, was just posted. It is not possible for me to post something on every meeting, and I usually do so only if there is something of particular importance to me. For tomorrow’s SacATC, it is the work zone policy. It may be useful to others to see a schedule of meetings that I often or sometimes attend. For all of these meetings, they may be cancelled or rescheduled, so it is alway best to check before attending. Though most meetings are viewable online, either during or after, fewer and fewer offer public comment, except ahead of time or in person, at the meeting.
You are welcome to add meetings that you think would be of interest to transportation and housing advocates, in comments. Certainly no one needs more meetings to attend, but my experience is that if you attend a meeting regularly, people get to know you and your interests, and you can really make a difference.
The Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC) will meet on Thursday, January 18, at 5:30PM. This meeting will be at Historic City Hall, hearing room 2nd floor, though it usually meets in council chambers in new city hall. You can watch in person or online via https://meetings.cityofsacramento.org. You can comment via the eComment function on the meetings page, and in person. eComments are placed in the meeting record, but if you want to be heard, you must attend. Apparently Zoom is no longer available.
Agenda
Commission Staff Report (Oral Report)
Consent Calendar
Approval of Active Transportation Commission Meeting Minutes
Active Transportation Commission Log
Discussion Calendar
Selection of Chair and Vice Chair for Calendar Year 2024
Draft Work Zone and Event Detour Policy
Log Item Report Back: Sacramento’s Alleys
Commissioner Comments – Ideas and Questions
Public Comments-Matters Not on the Agenda
Work Zone
The most important agenda item is 4, Draft Work Zone and Event Detour Policy. I have several prior posts on this. Please read if you want to make comments. Though there could be a number of improvements to the policy, it is overall very good, and far, far better than anything that exists today. The two critical improvements are that the policy must address PROWAG (Public Right of Way Accessibility Guidelines), which are now the law of the land (though not yet enforceable until adopted by US DOT and US DOJ), and that there must be monitoring of all projects that are more than one day duration. The city has claimed that they have contractors (not the construction companies, but separate compliance contractors) monitoring at least once, but clearly that is not happening, as there are violations of ADA on nearly every construction project, and corrections are either slow to occur or never occur.
STAR, Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders, has created several posts on Truxel Bridge, the City of Sacramento effort to add a motor vehicle, transit, walking and bicycling bridge over the American River in alignment with Truxel Road. The STAR interest is that the original bridge proposal, approved by Sacramento County under the American River Parkway Plan and by SacRT, was for a bridge that carried light rail, walking and bicycling, not motor vehicles.
View these posts, and likely more to come in the future, on STAR at category ‘Truxel Bridge‘.
The ‘share the road’ sign, which has been very popular with traffic engineers, is NOT in the 2023 MUTCD. So this sign is dead, and a well deserved death. The ‘share the road’ sign was often interpreted by drivers to mean, bicyclists must share the road with motor vehicles, or in less polite terms, “get out of my way, the sign says so”. The share the road diamond shaped sign was never a legal MUTCD sign, though they were and are quite common.
W16-1P sign, which used to say ‘share the road’ now says ‘in road’, as in, bicycles in roadway. The left sign is common, the middle sign can be used, and the right sign is for temporary traffic control (TTC). Since this new sign content replaces the old with the same sign designation, I take it to mean that the old sign may no longer be used at all, and must be replaced by the new sign.
W16-1PW16-1aPW16-1P for TTC
The plaque is not used by itself, but with the W11-1 bicycle sign, below. Though the yellow version of the W11-1/W16-1P assembly is permitted, this sign would more likely be used at TTC in a construction zone.
MUTCD W11-1/W16-1P assembly sign ‘bicycles in road’
Outside of construction zones, the preferable sign would be MUTCD R9-20 ‘bikes allowed use of full lane’, below, and this sign can also be used in construction zones. This sign is similar to the old MUTCD R4-11 sign, which is no longer in the MUTCD.
MUTCD R9-20 ‘bicycles allowed use of full lane’
Only in a few cases does the MUTCD require replacement of existing signs, but does require that the current sign be used in any new installation.
The new MUTCD recognizes the green painted bicycle lanes and green dotted bicycle lanes (often called skip marking) through conflict areas such as merges and intersections. Unfortunately, it did not drop recognition of the ‘sharrow’ shared lane marking. Though the sharrow can be legitimately used to show a bicyclist path in confusing locations, it has generally been used to bias roadways against bicyclists and to encourage motorists to fail to yield to bicyclists in the roadway. Maybe next time!
The MUTCD now has an entire chapter devoted to bicycles, Part 9: Traffic Control for Bicycle Facilities. This is progress, even if less than desired.
The 11th edition of the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) was released in December by FHWA (Federal Highway Administration), so is the 2023 version. The update included solicited comments from the public for the first time, as previously it had been solely the work of traffic engineer insiders. As a result, it is better than the previous version, but still has many unsafe practices included. Though it is supposed to be only about signs and pavement markings, it grades into roadway design, with an emphasis on high speed freeways. Much of it should be limited to highways, but it is regularly applied, or mis-applied, to local streets.
I have been focused on Part 6: Temporary Traffic Control, because it relates to the City of Sacramento work zone policy update. The diagrams are much easier to digest than the text, but the text is also critical. Most of the text and diagrams relate to freeways and expressways, where sidewalks and bike facilities are absent, but it does have some information that affects walking and bicycling. The document uses the phrase ‘shall’ to indicate that a practice must be followed, however, the entire document is prefaced with allowance and encouragement to use engineering judgement. Other terms such as guidance and support are used, for ‘good ideas’ but not requirements. It is very unlikely that I will ever read the entire document; it is 1,150 pages!
California has in the past adopted its own version of the federal MUTCD, the CA-MUTCD. The current California version is 2014, and it took the state five years to develop this version and get it approved. Hopefully it will take far less time this go-round. The California version deletes some text and diagrams from the federal, adds some diagrams, and adds quite a bit of text. In most case, the California version specifies clearer or safer information, but not always. In some cases the California version has been included in the new federal version, so does not need to vary. I have not seen any announcement from Caltrans about a state update.
I attended the Work Zone and Event Detour Policy Roundtable on January 9, with city staff and various stakeholders. All present agreed that current practice was unacceptable. Two companies that provide construction signing for projects talked about the challenges, including signs and barricades being placed and then moved by the public. I pointed to the two most important issues not addressed in the draft policy: 1) the policy must be explicit about requirements in PROWAG, and 2) the policy is meaningless if there is no monitoring. A number of people had anecdotes about projects that failed to offer accommodation for walkers and bicyclists, in addition to the hundreds of 311 reports that I have filed.
Posts related to the work zone guidelines are linked via category ‘Work Zones‘ within City of Sacramento category. Posts about construction project issues, previous to and after the release of the draft guidelines, of which there are a huge number, are linked via tag ‘construction zone‘ within Active Transportation category.
I woke up this morning with thoughts about how Governor Newsom could largely solve the budget deficit. And shortly thereafter ran across the CalBike-led letter, co-signed by 25 organizations, to the governor about shifting budget priorities: Stop Fueling Climate Change: Coalition Challenges Governor to Shift Transportation Spending. In the Governor’s initial budget proposal, there is no reduction in highway building whatsoever. It is as though this is the sacred mission of the state, to fund and build highways at the level desired by Caltrans, and the asphalt lobby, no matter what else is going on in the state, with budget or climate. This is called the ‘Infrastructure Cult’ by Strong Towns.
The letter’s four asks are:
Consider any proposed reductions in General Fund spending on transportation infrastructure in the context of our climate and equity goals
Backfill any General Fund cuts by leveraging the existing statutory flexibility of federal highway formula funds as well as funding from the State Highway Account.
Suspend California state investment in new highway capacity
Develop a multi-year funding commitment that ensures at least 50% of the State Highway Account (SHA) funds go to VMT-reducing projects while prioritizing investments in California’s most burdened communities.
I support all of these ideas, but of course would go further:
Suspend SHOPP funding, the funding which is supposed to maintain and improve (but not expand) our highway system until an audit of the SHOPP program is complete. This would take at least a year, maybe more. SHOPP is the biggest part of the Caltrans budget, so the savings for this year would be considerable.
Suspend all STIP funding, the funding which is used to build new infrastructure, indefinitely, except for the TIRCP (rail and transit) and ATP (walking and bicycling) programs. This is much the same as the letter’s third action.
Propose to the legislature a bill that would convert all HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes (which are worthless in practice because so routinely violated), to tolled lanes, statewide, within five years. This effort would include state funding to accelerate creation of tolling authorities where they don’t exist, and to study merging of tolling authorities into regional entities.
Propose to the legislature a bill that would not only allow but encourage and/or require the conversion of general purpose lanes to toll lanes. For the time being, this would preserve two general purpose lanes on highways with more than two lanes per direction, but ultimately, all lanes would be tolled. Highways are incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and general funds should never be spent on highways because they are not used by a significant portion of the population. And if all users are tolled in all lanes, the tolls would be reasonable and equitable.
Propose a bill to the legislature that assigns CalSTA (California State Transportation Agency) a study of the charter and organization of Caltrans. Caltrans is an outmoded legacy agency which should be reoriented towards meeting the needs of citizen access and climate action, and most specifically maintaining what we have and not continuing to build new.
Support governance options with one Caltrans voting member, but not two
Support inclusion of Sacramento Transportation Authority as the Sac county agency
Tolling advances user pays concept, which transportation advocates support
If the JPA had been in place, Fix50 project would have had toll lanes rather than HOV: HOV lanes don’t work for management because they are routinely violated
Support does not indicate that I support adding lanes in Yolo, but if lanes are added, they should be tolled
Questions about JPA membership, board members and voting are probably best answered by proportional representation based on tolled lane miles rather than county representation, which is more consistent with citizen representation; this would also entice counties to add or convert tolled lanes so they could be part of the process and benefits
Conversion of HOV lanes and general purpose lanes to tolled lanes will be required in the future to maintain our very expensive highway system, so this is a start
Brian Abbanat of YoloTD also spoke.
Several board members spoke, and to summarize and paraphrase their comments:
Rich Desmond and Eric Guerra supported a lanes miles voting idea
Karina Talamantes expressed concern but seemed satisfied by the answers
Bret Daniels expressed the standard ‘I don’t want to pay anything’ and tolling is for rich Tesla people
Phil Serna asked about safety of adjacent lanes, SACOG responded that safety can be part of the infrastructure and/or tolling design; I don’t think the idea of separation on the causeway has come up before; also asked about detection and enforcement
Eric Guerra said benefit or presentation is raising awareness
Patrick Hume actually said that eventually we will need to toll not just lanes but entire facilities
Overall, the concerns of the board were mainly that Sacramento County be treated equitably in terms of tolled projects, design of tolls, and distribution of toll revenue; several people also commented that the focus on excess revenue may be premature since it isn’t clear that there will be excess revenue, and some of it is already dedicated to mitigation measures.
Kevin Bewsey presented on SacTA’s role in the JPA, including how votes would be handled.
Though no motion was made on the issue, nor any vote taken, the consensus of the board seems to be:
Support for creation of the JPA
Support for creating tolled lanes in Sacramento County
Yes to SacTA being the agency for Sacramento County
Yes to appointing members of the SacTA board to the JPA board, probably with one county representative and one city representative (under the staff recommended governance structure, SACOG would appoint another from its own board, and from Sacramento County or a city within)
Concern about the governance model treatment of Sacramento County, and concern about a voting methodology that is equitable for Sacramento County, but willingness to allow some uncertainty here for the time being (the voting document created by SACOG was not presented, but was discussed since several SacTA board members are also SACOG board members)
map of potential tolled lanes in the SACOG region
Note: I am unsure of the source of this map. It was referred to as being in the 2020 SCS, but I don’t find it there. Apologies for the low resolution, it was extracted from the SACOG presentation today, not from an original source.
For additional posts on managed lanes in general, this regional tolling authority, and the Yolo 80 project, see category ‘managed lanes‘.
The proposal for a tolling authority JPA for the Sacramento region came before a special meeting the SACOG Transportation Committee yesterday. Agenda item 2 was to recommend to the SACOG Board that the JPA effort move forward, and that was passed after a whole lot of information and even more discussion. The reason for it coming back is that several options for governance membership are now included, which were not available in December. The tolling authority would be called Capital Area Regional Tolling Authority (CARTA). The meeting can be viewed on YouTube, and the supporting documents are available from SACOG.
presentation page on tolling JPA governance options
For reasons that were not clear to me, SACOG staff added an addendum to the item at the last minute, Evaluation of Voting Options, about how votes might be allocated on use of excess revenue. At least one-third of the meeting time was taken up by discussing this issue, though it was not to be voted on, and is not even relevant in the near future. It will be years before there is any excess revenue to be spent, there will not likely be a large amount of excess revenue, and there is already a long list of mitigations to be funded by excess revenue that are part of the Yolo 80 project. Just when the committee was ready to move on from this topic, SACOG staff brought it up again. Argh!
It is typical of government councils or boards, when composed of more than one government agency, to spend an absurd amount of time haggling over membership. The situation is created when these boards adopt a one-member/one-vote policy, where the vote of each member weighs equally with each other. This sounds like representative government, analogous to one-person/one-vote that our democracy is founded on (with the exception of the US Senate, of course). But it is NOT analogous, and it is NOT representative. Smaller agencies have an outsized affect on the outcome, which is the case of transportation related boards means that smaller cities and rural areas have a much larger voice than they would have if voting were population weighted. We recognize this in creating city council districts, supervisor district, legislative districts, and US House of Representative districts, where each district has an approximately equal number of people. And it is why we do redistricting, so that this balance is maintained over time as population shifts. But for some reason, when it comes to transportation, the usual solution is to give each entity the same voice. I believe this is wrong. In most cases, voting should be population weighted.
In the case of the tolling authority, however, I believe that membership and voting should be weighted by tolled lane miles. This means that initially, only Yolo County, through YoloTD, would have that voice, and other counties would gain that voice over time as they added tolled lane miles. It would make sense to add membership and voting rights at the beginning of construction, not at opening of the toll facility, since decisions about tolling amounts, discounts or exceptions, and hours would start to be made at that point. Since Sacramento County has the largest number of freeways likely to be eventually tolled, it would end up with the highest membership and weighted voting, but not at this time.
Caltrans spend an inordinate amount of time in the meeting defending their right to one or two voting memberships. They had a long list of expertise they could provide, though when challenged to put a dollar value on in-kind or contracted work, was flummoxed. Though both Caltrans District 3 denied it, it was pretty clear to me that they had their eye on excess revenue for future capacity expansion projects. Caltrans has never really had to justify its work or existence to anyone, and when challenged to do so, is quite inept at it.
I spoke at the meeting, the only member of the public to do so. My points were:
Support creation of regional tolling JPA
Support governance options with one Caltrans voting member, not two
Support inclusion of Sacramento Transportation Authority as Sac county agency
Voting options for excess revenue can be deferred because there likely won’t be any for a while
Tolling advances user pays concept, which transportation advocates support
HOV lanes don’t work for management because they are routinely violated
Support does not indicate that I support adding lanes in Yolo, but if lanes are added, they should be tolled
For additional posts on managed lanes in general, this regional tolling authority, and the Yolo 80 project, see category ‘managed lanes‘.
The 19th Street bikeway has been completed from W Street to Broadway. Only a half block of the two blocks is separated bikeway, and it is on the right side rather than left side as it is to the north. At W Street there is a bike box in line with the bikeway to the north, and a green dashed bikeway to carry the bikeway from the left or east side to the right or west side. The curved area shown in the photo does not have any sort of protection to reduce turn speeds, as is present on most turn wedges in the rest of the Central City Mobility Project.
The turn intersection involves a two stage turn for bicyclists, once to cross W Street to the south side, and then to cross 19th Street to the west side. There is no separate bicycle phase or bicycle signal face here. The pedestrian crossing phohibition here and lack of crosswalk indicates two things: there is no sidewalk on the south or freeway side of W Street, and that high speed turns from W Street to 19th Street are expected and encouraged. This project would have been a great time to add a crosswalk and pedestrian signaling here, and remove the prohibition, as both sides of 19th Street under the freeway have sidewalks, so a crosswalk would speed travel for walkers by offering two routes of travel. Bicyclists using the green dashed crossing of 19th Street have turning traffic at their back, which is somewhat unsafe but could have been made safer with an exclusive bicyclist phase or even a bicyclist signal phase. Since the signal timing favors W Street over 19th Street, it could have been possible to allow both a brief bicyclist phase and a turning phase.
19th St bikeway transition to right side
Crossing under the freeway, the bikeway is partly green painted and next to a travel lane, and partly parking protected bikeway to X Street. From X Street to Broadway, it is a regular door-zone bike lane. At Broadway, there a green bike box the full width of the street, allowing bicyclists to continue straight or turn left onto Broadway.
To summarize, the design is OK but could have been better.
Getting Around Sacramento 