By Linda Taaffe

Marlis McAllister crosses her fingers every time her 11-year-old son gets on his bicycle for the mile ride to the Almond Camp School on the Egan campus. The route takes him from his home on El Monte Road and across San Antonio Road - two of Los Altos’ busiest streets. McAllister said she has counted as many as one accident a month near her home. Impatient commuters have nearly struck her son twice while he was in the El Monte bike lane, to pass cars waiting to turn left, she said.

“I can’t put him in a bubble,” she said. “I cross my fingers every day he goes out the door and hope nothing happens to him.”

Don’t think that McAllister relies on fate alone to protect her son - the attorney is part of a growing grass-roots movement in Los Altos dedicated to making the streets safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. Through resident efforts, the city has secured about $1 million in grant money for various traffic-calming projects throughout the city.

McAllister is co-chairwoman of the Almond Safe Routes to School team, which recently received $310,000 in grants for traffic-calming improvements along El Monte near Almond School and is drafting a plan for Almond Avenue at the front of the school. The El Monte project will bring some of the city’s first significant traffic-calming elements to Los Altos streets. The plan will narrow the street and create “visual friction” with physical barriers, such as landscaped medians and a raised crosswalk, to slow motorists. City staff is set to release a Request for Proposal to get the project under way, though the city has not established a time line yet.

McAllister said fear and frustration prompted her to team up with neighbors to find funding elsewhere for traffic solutions after discovering that the city’s lean budget provided little money for traffic improvements.

The Almond team applied for a federal grant from the Department of Transportation to fund a portion of El Monte street improvements that the Los Altos City Council paid a consultant to study and develop, but ultimately tabled, because of funding issues.

“Something is stopping the (traffic-calming) process from happening. Plans get to the city and come to a screeching halt,” McAllister said of the city’s traffic efforts.

The Almond team isn’t the only group of residents taking up traffic issues. A group of Loyola School parents secured a $500,000 grant from the Department of Transportation in 2001 to make Berry Avenue physically safer for pedestrians. The city is scheduled to start the project this summer.

The Montclaire and St. Simon Parent-Teacher associations are working on securing a grant for a pedestrian-activated crosswalk system at the intersection of Grant and Morton avenues. Residents near Los Altos High School have joined the Almond team to work on other grants that would provide funding for improvements the entire length of the one-mile street, including the area in front of the high school.

“This process is unique in the sense that the community came forward with (a plan),” said John Ciccarelli, one of the traffic consultants working on conceptual plans with Almond neighbors. “The city didn’t just say, ‘Here’re the final plans.’ The community has been involved with every stage. They know the street. They know the problems.”

The project, still in the conceptual stage, combines about a half dozen different types of vertical and horizontal barriers to slow traffic and make the street safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. If approved, the street could have three compact traffic roundabouts, sidewalk, curb and intersection improvements, chicanes and islands.

Almond is a neighborhood collector street that serves two schools, which means it is wider and meant to handle more traffic than other residential streets. Speed and pedestrian safety are concerns, Ciccarelli said.

“We don’t want to divert traffic to other streets. That’s not our objective,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage slow and steady speeds.”

Residents citywide ranked traffic their No. 2 city concern, according to a Los Altos Neighborhood Network survey. They told city staff during a city-sponsored traffic study last year that they would rather discourage traffic than widen streets for better flow. The council recently incorporated this goal into its updated General Plan - a move in the opposite direction from Santa Clara County and other Peninsula cities that are pushing to improve traffic flow.

“We live in a faster driving culture. There seems to be support for getting traffic moving, but the pedestrian has been forgotten,” said El Monte neighbor Kristi Clarke, who wrote the Almond grant request and helped form the traffic group SAFE.

Traffic volume and speed are an impending threat to all pedestrians and bicyclists who use the streets. Tragedy is just waiting to happen, she added.

The council also says traffic is a top priority even though some traffic problems have been reduced during the recession.

“I think the traffic problems have been mostly due to the tech boom and due to the drop-off problem at our schools,” said Councilman King Lear, who has pushed for traffic-calming projects. “But the future of this Peninsula area is that the residential density in the cities around us will continue to increase while the capacity of our Los Altos streets will remain the same. The commuter traffic through our town will continue to be a problem forever.”

The city has spent approximately $228,000 over the past two years on traffic studies and is considering whether to establish a permanent transportation committee or commission this month.

So why is traffic calming moving at such a slow pace?

Funding appears to be the biggest barrier. The council deferred the $150,000 set aside for traffic-calming projects in 2001-02 and “defunded” another $185,000 for signal and street names projects to put toward other projects, including the construction of the Egan gymnasium at an earlier date than initially planned.

“This would have left us with some flexibility for capital projects,” Lear said. “But there was always the risk that we would find it difficult to fund the Egan gym even on the original schedule after the state cuts.”

The council is considering implementing a traffic impact fee on new construction projects as an alternative to fund traffic-calming projects. Such a fee could raise as much as $1.3 million over the next 20 years, according to city studies.

The city is scheduled to fill its full-time traffic engineer position next week. The position has been vacant for the past year. The public works director also works on traffic issues. In the police department, the patrol division devotes about 20 percent of its time to traffic enforcement.

City Manager Phil Rose said the city has directed much of its efforts toward traffic calming. The city added a traffic team to the police department in 1999; formed the Neighborhood Traffic Advisory Task Force to develop a neighborhood traffic management program that would enable residents to petition the city for partial funding of traffic improvements; created the joint City/Schools Traffic and Bicycle Advisory committees; and recently dropped speed limits on several city streets. City staff secured grants for two bicycle projects and is working on two more applications.

Maria Murphy Lonergan, a member of the Neighborhood Traffic Advisory Task Force and co-chairwoman of the Almond Safe Routes team, said successful traffic calming requires a three-pronged approach: enforcement, education and engineering.

Los Altos is missing the engineering component, Lonergan and her peers said.

Traffic programs are flawed and studies remain incomplete, they say.

The city spent $25,000 on consultants for the El Monte Traffic Plan but ditched the project, Clarke said.

A traffic plan with permanent barriers would have cost about $878,000 to implement - money the city doesn’t have. The council considered less expensive, temporary measures but postponed putting them in place once the Almond group secured a grant for some of the permanent, and more aesthetic, improvements.

Clarke said the city could have implemented the improvements in small sections over time but they chose to halt the entire project.

“There are too many competing priorities in the city. I think the city is relying on our grass-roots effort to get a lot of projects done,” she said.

Lonergan said the neighborhood traffic management program that she helped create while on the task force needs to be revamped. She said the process is slow and the neighborhood vote required to approve street improvements is virtually impossible to achieve. Of the 11 neighborhoods that have applied for street improvements since the program was put in place in 1999, not one has been able to win a vote - not even Lonergan’s Hawthorne Avenue neighborhood. The Los Altos Mediation Program has stepped forward to help guide neighborhoods through the process, Lonergan said.

“A lot of the work related to traffic is done ‘behind the scenes,’” Public Works Director Jim Porter said. “It takes a long time to implement projects. It’s a rigorous process. I can understand some of the residents’ frustrations. They don’t understand that engineering is responding to requests for stop signs, striping, no parking zones and other projects on a daily basis. We are also working with our signal maintenance contractor to keep the signals running smoothly. A lot of the work occurs so that residents don’t see problems with traffic operations on a daily basis.”

Porter said engineering solutions are often controversial.

“People take great pride in their streets. We need to come up with solutions acceptable to the neighborhood. That’s a long process to get an agreement,” Porter said.

Only one neighborhood out of the 11 Neighborhood Traffic Management applications opted to move forward with a vote for traffic engineering solutions, he added. “Staff is putting considerable effort into the Neighborhood Traffic Management Plan requests. We have completed four, have four more currently in progress and have another five requests yet to be worked on. We have not installed any traffic control devices as part of the four studies that we completed because the affected neighborhoods agreed that the problems could be handled through enforcement and didn’t require physical alterations to the streets,” he added.

Clarke said she would like to see the council create a traffic committee that falls under the city’s planning department. This would help unify the individual traffic projects into a citywide plan. A committee could help define traffic projects and push them through city hall.

Porter would like to see a traffic committee, too.

“We’ve already laid down a lot of the footwork,” Porter said. Implementation is the next step.

Clarke, Lonergan, McAllister and other traffic advocates say they intend on seeing traffic projects through.