California Calculating

Palo Alto, California, a 59,000-population city between San Francisco and San Jose, illustrates the trend toward context-sensitive design and the role that painstaking highway safety studies play in attaining attractive roads. Bicyclists, civic-minded residents, champions of tree planting, and parents of schoolchildren lobbied for changes to El Camino Real, a state road that carries 50,000 vehicles a day through the affluent neighbor of Stanford University. In the 4.3 mile stretch of El Camino, the aim of local people was to plant the six-lane road’s median more consistently with trees, make it easier for pedestrians to cross the 120-foot right-of-way, establish bike lanes, widen the sidewalks, perhaps narrow some sections to four travel lanes, and generally make the corridor more appealing. The state transportation agency Caltrans was willing to do context-sensitive design, says Reid Ewing, a subconsultant to Oakland-based Community Design and Architecture, the city’s lead consultants on the project. But when the idea of planting large trees in a narrow median — less than 10 feet from traffic — was broached, transportation specialists for the state said statistics showed that “medians with trees had higher crash rates,” Ewing says. “We took their report and turned it around and reanalyzed it,” Ewing says. “We found that medians with trees were safer than untreed medians.” As a result, Caltrans has allowed the city to start its planting program by installing about 250 trees, even in parts of the median that are just eight feet wide. Along the entire stretch, “we’d like to plant 1,000 trees,” says Virginia Warheit, Palo Alto senior planner. For that to take place, thin sections of the median, which now varies from three to 16 feet wide, would have to be broadened. That would be beneficial because it would create a refuge for pedestrians crossing the road, Warheit says. This fall the City Council is expected to vote on two alternative plans, one of which would reduce the number of travel lanes on part of El Camino to four. Oddly enough, fewer lanes could actually help traffic move more smoothly. Warheit says that the lane reduction, which calls for construction of bulb-outs at certain intersections, would reduce the expanse of pavement and thus cut the time needed to cross the road by 28 percent. Motorists would spend less time stopped at traffic lights waiting for pedestrians to cross. Sidewalks now 7.5 feet wide would be widened to 10 feet and the street would be better marked for on-street parking and a 5-foot bike lane. Caltrans readily agreed to reduce the travel lanes to 11 feet. Other consultants on the project are Fehr & Peers for traffic analysis, Joe McBride for urban forestry, LCC Inc. for civil engineering, and Urban Advantage for photo simulations.