Back to the Weekly Home Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

On Deadline: No rush to arms for El Camino civil war

by Jay Thorwaldson

Virginia Warheit has been thinking much in recent months about 120 feet.

That's the right-of-way width of El Camino Real as it passes through Palo Alto, carrying its load of traffic, sign clutter, strip commercial, California history and state-highway bureaucracy. Warheit is the city planning official spearheading a redesign study funded mostly by a $240,000 Caltrans grant.

Suddenly in July those 120 feet erupted as a major community concern, as press reports touted a city staff "recommendation" (actually just an alternative) that parts of El Camino be reduced from six lanes to four.

This stirred visions of traffic jams at lane-reduction points and, worse, the specter of "spillover" traffic onto parallel routes -- one of the touchiest political buttons in Palo Alto, the concern that helped kill (along with costs) a "roundabouts" experiment on Embarcadero Road last year.

Councilman Jack Morton asked if someone wanted to start a "civil war" -- partly based on a misunderstood statistic but also reflecting the power of people's perceptions.

The Trees for Palo Alto group (which predated the redesign project with its dream of planting a thousand more trees along El Camino) held an emergency huddle to figure how to let people know it wasn't behind the lane-reduction concept.

Before folks start lining up at recruiting stations, consider two things: (1) CalTrans is not about to allow anything to restrict traffic on its state highway -- which carries about 50,000 vehicles a day; and (2) all eight members of the Palo Alto City Council attending an El Camino study session July 15 agreed in a "strong consensus" that nothing should be done to create traffic spillover.

The staff got the message loud and clear, Warheit said. Yet staff members already know that many drivers opt for Alma Street during commute hours, despite it's tight four-lane configuration, because the drivers know it's faster -- 25 percent faster, according to staff "test drives" on various routes. But don't tell anyone, OK?

So El Camino already has lost much of its "thoroughfare" glitter -- a key underlying assumption of the redesign project that could supplant standards established for state highways in the 1950s or earlier.

The cast-in-concrete rigidity of those standards has bothered local officials up and down the state for years. Only in the past two years have state-highway brass been willing to explore alternatives that might better reflect today's usage.

That gets us back to the magic 120 feet that Warheit and other city staff members, consultants, citizens, business owners, and neighborhood-group representatives have been pondering.

The old standards require six 12-foot lanes and a full 12-foot median -- 84 feet. Gutters, sidewalks and parking lanes take up the rest. But 12-foot lanes are wider than just about any road standard anywhere, including the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) standards that are becoming the norm.

Key features coming from the extensive redesign process so far include (1) a narrower 11-foot median, dropping to 8 feet for turn lanes (both allowing trees); (2) narrowing traffic lanes to 11 feet for the outside lane; 10.5 feet for the middle lane and 11 feet for the lane by the median; (3) a 7-foot-wide parking lane; (4) a 5-foot bike lane; and (5) a 10-foot-wide sidewalk, up from 8 feet -- plus curbs and gutters.

For turn-lane stretches, the median would drop to 8 feet, the bike lane to 4.5 feet; and the sidewalks and parking would be combined into a 14-foot wide sidewalk with 7-foot-wide "parking bays" cut in as needed, creating wide-sidewalk areas in between for benches or landscaping.

And yes, bicyclists do use El Camino (200 to 300 per day, according to traffic counts), mostly during mid-day.

As for the "spillover traffic" civil war, someone needs to be really spoiling for a good fight to rush to arms at this stage -- few are betting on the lane-reduction alternative.

And if the Caltrans and City Council directives aren't enough, consider California's $24 billion budget deficit. Getting some trees planted and restriping lanes to make room for a bike lane might be all one can dream of for the next decade or so.

< BI>Jay Thorwaldson is editor of the Weekly. He can be e-mailed at jthorwaldson@pawekely.com.