Guest Opinion: Making a 'school corridor' safer for children -- and drivers Guest Opinion: Making a 'school corridor' safer for children -- and drivers (September 14, 2005)

by Penny Elson

Housing development on the Charleston Arastradero School Corridor will soon exceed anything south Palo Alto has seen since the 1950s, when developers were mowing down fields to build housing tracts.

Proposed developments range from to 11- to 40-housing-units per acre. Traffic from a projected 922 new units, plus new and expanded private schools, a new Campus for Jewish Life, and 100,000 square feet of new Stanford Research Park office space will be added to one street -- a major school route.

This street serves 11 public and private elementary, middle and high schools with more than 5,000 students, many of whom ride bikes or walk to school. The plan currently before the city provides widened, continuous bike lanes, improved pedestrian crossings, pedestrian refuges and other safety improvements appropriate for a school corridor.

Charleston/Arastradero also is a cross-town residential arterial with real problems. For drivers, it's "speed up and wait." In some places, frustrated drivers sit in long lines, as at the approach to Gunn High School and Foothill Expressway.

Other sections with expressway-like width and lower traffic volumes invite speeding, even in school zones. In the zone between Nelson Drive and Carlson, 15 percent of drivers (or about 2,250 daily) have been clocked going faster than 38 miles per hour -- killing speeds.

We must find ways to make this route safer. I know personally that the problem is very real. My cyclist husband has been hit twice on the road. Several adult neighborhood friends and a school crossing guard have also been hit. I have observed numerous near misses on the corridor, mostly due to drivers who don't recognize the special nature of this cross-town arterial.

The proposed road design will ensure safer speeds in school zones. The Charleston/Arastradero Plan addresses road segments individually. It adds a fifth turning lane where additional capacity is needed (as at Gunn/Foothill). Where excess capacity encourages speeding, the plan reduces the road to two lanes plus turning lanes -- about half the corridor has excess capacity that will permit this treatment.

Large segments will remain four lanes, including approaches to big intersections (El Camino Real, Middlefield, Alma) and all of West Charleston (due to the Caltrain gates preempting the signal at Alma).

Enforcement alone cannot solve the safety problem. Enforcement is an on-going cost, and is not as effective as creating a safer design. It does not add bike lanes or capacity for increasing traffic volumes. The current plan has good news for drivers: It will maintain point-to-point travel times and even add capacity for automobiles by providing features to improve traffic flow -- including an innovative "traffic adaptive" signal system that is far better than simply synchronizing lights. Adaptive systems are a smart new technology that allows signals to communicate with each other to respond to changes in traffic flow at intersections -- improving efficiency and capacity by approximately 20 percent.

Research shows that left-turn lanes are so efficient that going from four to three lanes (with the third being a turn lane) results in little loss of street capacity because vehicles no longer need to stop behind (or swerve around) left-turning vehicles. Reducing sudden stops and swerving also makes the road safer for drivers.

Combined with other improvements, adaptive signals and lane reductions will maintain or even improve point-to-point travel times while improving safety for non-motorists.

This is no experiment. The plan was designed by Terry Bottomley, a respected expert on urban street design. Over two decades he has completed more than 25 streetscape design and planning projects in California. Other communities have implemented lane reductions on similar roads with positive effect. We know it can work.

If we create a safer street environment, more children will likely walk or bike to school. This means reduced auto traffic. If we do nothing, the reverse will happen -- as traffic increases, concerned parents will drive their children to school, making everything worse.

There is one big question: money. In the past, projects of this kind were paid for by county or state transportation funds or through bonds -- which now are much more difficult to get with the two-thirds approval required. State takeaways of other revenues and increased restrictions on use of city utility revenues has further reduced available city funds.

Yet pressure to develop (or redevelop) areas of our community continues. Communities throughout California are looking increasingly at "impact fees" to help pay for improved infrastructure required by new development, especially housing. Developers pay a small portion of the cost of mitigating impacts of their projects.

Palo Alto currently has impact fees to help pay for parks, libraries and community centers. Efficient, safe transportation infrastructure is at least equally important.

The Charleston/Arastradero Plan includes a proposed impact fee that would require developers of projects within a half-mile radius of the corridor to pay a fee per each new weekday bike or pedestrian trip generated. Estimated revenues over 10 years would be about $817,000, or 12.2 percent of the total estimated cost of implementing the full plan. The remainder of its $6.7million cost must be from state and federal grants. The fee will sunset in 2015, when the corridor project is targeted for completion.

It is unusual to base an impact fee on pedestrian/bike trips. But the corridor is being transformed into a more residential area. Housing is replacing office buildings, a hotel and a shopping center. This increased residential character requires a safer, more pedestrian/bike friendly corridor.

The law also requires the city to measure a project's impacts only on the difference between what the new project will generate and what the previous use generated at full capacity -- whether or not the site has been used at full capacity in the past, as with Hyatt Rickey's. A fee based on added vehicle impacts would result in Hyatt paying no impact fee and the Campus for Jewish Life paying large fees. Using pedestrian/bike trips spreads the fee more fairly and connects it directly to safety improvements.

This plan -- fully consistent with Palo Alto's Comprehensive Plan -- makes room for growth while creating a safer, more efficient corridor for motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians, including more than 5,000 school-bound children.

It keeps neighborhoods connected to schools, parks, libraries, community centers and retail. This is the planning vision that defines Palo Alto's quality of life -- which is why our City Council and Planning & Transportation Commission both unanimously approved it.

Now it's time to get it done. That requires money. The proposed development impact fee, to be considered Sept. 26 by City Council, will provide just enough to implement a trial of the lane reductions and provide some seed money to match grants.

It's time to move this project forward toward a long-term vision for a safer community.

Penny Ellson is co-chair of the Civic Affairs Committee for Greenmeadow Community Association and serves on the Charleston/Arastradero Study Advisory Group. She is traffic safety representative for Fairmeadow Elementary School PTA and is PTA Elementary School Representative to the City/School Traffic Safety Committee. She can be e-mailed at pellson@pacbell.net.

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