Publication Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Palo Alto's private paths
Palo Alto's private paths
(May 25, 2005) Residents find challenges, benefits to owning their streets
by Daniel Grujic
There are a few things Palo Alto resident Bhanu Iyengar has had to do that her neighbors around the corner haven't: repair her street, for one.
That's because Bhanu Iyengar lives on Ellsworth Place -- a private road in Palo Alto. One year ago, potholes littered the road, and residents could not keep up repairing it with homebrewed methods.
"The street was really bad," she said.
Since the city wasn't about to fix it -- it's not under their jurisdiction -- the residents had to repair their entire street with private funds. Iyengar was the organizer for the fundraising effort, which netted $22,000 to hire a paving company.
Palo Alto is home to 22 private streets, which come with their benefits and unique challenges. Generally they are much narrower than their public counterparts. Rarely composed of the same pavement that residents are accustomed to, many of the private roads seem like they are little more than hiking trails doused with gravel.
Iyengar was able to raise the money from her neighbors, but many communities are not as organized as the Ellsworth residents, or may not have the necessary funds to undertake a repair.
It is not uncommon to see residents take on pothole filling on an individual level, fixing only the damage around their individual properties. Oftentimes this smaller effort produces amateurish repairs, with the roads' resulting mounds and dips testing a car's suspension system.
Palo Alto Public Works Director Glenn Roberts said that the idea and reasoning behind private roads "goes back to the whole idea of condominium development, where [individuals] retain ownership rights to all common areas."
This right to ownership allows the housing developments to cut costs by constructing a roadway that does not need to comply with all the city rules and regulations.
In a way, the narrower streets without sidewalks make sense because many private roads are little more than glorified driveways, Roberts said. They allow access to a neighborhood and often end in a cul-de-sac, so the streets don't carry a lot of traffic.
The quiet and small nature of the private roads does tend to convey its advantages.
Iyengar also said that her children are usually free to play in the street as there is very little danger, because there are very few cars that pass. Private streets have little cut-through traffic because they rarely connect other throughways. Carolyn Garbarino of San Carlos Court said that the only people that drive down her street are the neighbors.
Garbarino called San Carlos "a lot quieter" than the public street she used to live on.
"You really get to know your neighbors," she said.
The prospect of private ownership also allows the owners of the road to take liberties with its design. At Villa Vista, the owners differentiate themselves from their public-street neighbors with the addition of blue brick sections of road at intersections.
There are no speed limits or restrictions on the sharpness of turns on private roads, factors that (in combination with the gravel) can make driving on another street, Roble Ridge, a fair bit more exciting than driving on El Camino.
However, along with the individuality and the cost-cutting benefits that street ownership provides also come the frustrations of maintenance, as Iyengar and her neighbors found out.
According to Roberts, city roads are maintained through the California gas tax. All the money collected from the pumps is re-distributed to the cities in accordance with the population. Palo Alto gets approximately 1.2 million dollars from the tax, which is supplemented with $800,000 the city provides from a general fund. Repairing asphalt is obviously not a monetary trifle, but the people living on the private streets are left on their own.
City services like recycling and utility repair are readily available to private-street residents, though Garbarino noted that city truck drivers sometimes have trouble maneuvering their vehicles on her small street.
The utilities are still handled by the city, and all homes on private streets are still required to adhere to the city building codes. Roberts said that there is no tax break that he is aware of that serves as a counterweight to the money and energy private street residents spend repairing their roads.
There are other rewards, though. When resident have to undertake a cooperative community effort, they get to know each other better. That's a valuable thing to Iyengar.
"It brought us closer together," she said. "We are a cohesive neighborhood."
Editorial Intern Daniel Grujic can be reached at dgrujic@paweekly.com.
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