City experts respond to resident queries about No. 1 problem

By Eliza Ridgeway, Town Crier Staff Writer

Emergency workers immobilize a victim of a multiple car collision on Foothill Expressway Nov. 27. Many residents consider traffic to be one of the major problems facing Los Altos.

Traffic affects every Los Altos resident who bikes, drives, walks or toddles along the city’s streets. No wonder traffic has often been cited in resident surveys over the years as the No. 1 problem in the community.

Residents can help solve the traffic problem by doing more than just driving safely. A seven-member traffic commission assists city council, staff and police, volunteering their time to plan improvements for neighborhoods.

The Neighborhood Traffic Management Program helps residents work with the city to plan and implement improvements.

A small but growing group of volunteers discourage speeders through the police department’s

Citizen Radar program. Parents at area schools work with the city to obtain grants to make school neighborhoods safer.

Many aspects of traffic safety and control in Los Altos can be confusing and frustrating. The Town Crier solicited and collected traffic questions from residents and submitted them to a roundtable of local traffic experts.

The questions, followed by answers from those knowledgeable about the issue follow.

Traffic roundtable

Is Los Altos compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act as far as the number of handicapped spaces we have downtown? Also, what are we going to do about the parking situation downtown? - Sandra Koo.

“The city qualified for the Americans with Disabilities Act funding, and we’ve used portions of that to put in handicapped parking in the plazas,” traffic commissioner Curt Riffle said. “As bad as it is to have to put people back there, there just wasn’t space in front (on Main and State streets). It was trying to compromise between what the shop owners needed and increased accessibility.

“We’d love to be involved in design downtown,” Riffle said. “As a citizen, I would love to see more of a pedestrian mall idea. Wouldn’t it be neat if certain days of the week, on Sundays or Saturdays, we could just have people on the street? If you could get downtown business behind it, that would be quite an impact.”

What can be done to make Los Altos friendlier and safer for bicyclists and pedestrians? - Elena Shea.

Aside from encouraging safe driving and slow speeds, the city can engineer streets and intersections that are safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. The Neighborhood Traffic Management Program lists eight different techniques to improve street environments, ranging from speed bumps to traffic circles.

City engineer Tom Ho is designing median islands at the intersection of El Monte and Hawthorne avenues. A grant application to improve school areas is pending with the state. The Safe Routes to School project grants funding for municipal projects and funded improvements such as the Berry and El Monte avenues traffic calming.

“It’s a grass-roots effort, a collaboration between parents and the city’s engineer,” planning commissioner Lanae Avra said.

The pending application proposes raised crosswalks, embedded lights and redesigned intersections at busier roads traveled by students around town, such as Springer, Grant and Homestead roads. Traffic commissioner Bill Crook said he expects the city will hear the results of the application sometime this month.

“Bike paths would allow people to get away from traffic completely,” Riffle said. “Our bicycle group has identified about 25 projects.” He said that once already the city requested and won a grant for a bike path, but then didn’t use the money after complaints from neighbors.

The Steven’s Creek Trail will extend through Mountain View and Cupertino to the borders of Los Altos, and Riffle hopes that this summer the city will launch a study of bringing the path into the city.

What can be done regarding excessively high speeds on just about every street in Los Altos? - Frank Dodge.

“Cut-through traffic certainly adds volume and speed to our streets,” Crook said. “(But) my observation from two and a half years as a substitute crossing guard is that a majority of the motorists exceeding the speed limit is us, not them - residents rushing to their destination, parents dropping off their children at school, etc. Perhaps the best traffic calming is getting people to slow down their lives so they are not always in a rush to get to their destinations.”

“If there is one thing that could be done to improve traffic safety across the entire state, it would be the elimination of the use of the 85th percentile rule as a practice,” traffic commissioner Kurt Ayers said. The 50-year-old legal tradition holds that street speeds should be set at the speed at which 85 percent of drivers travel. Speeds posted below that percentile may not be recognized in traffic court.

“The most egregious example was someone was caught at 62 mph on El Monte and it was thrown out of court,” Ayers said. “The Traffic Magistrate said until you have these streets posted to the 85th percentile, we aren’t going to honor any tickets.”

At the six intersections where accidents most often occur in Los Altos, the posted speed is typically 25 mph, while the average driver’s speed is almost 40 mph.

The speed limit on Springer Road was raised to 30 mph this month in a bid to make traffic citations stick.

The Los Altos Neighborhood Management Program spells out the process through which neighbors can petition the city to share the cost of adding traffic-calming measures to their street. Los Altos Police Officer Brent Butler said that it gives people concerned about speeding in their neighborhood “a mechanism, a process, with which they can explore options with the city.”

Why doesn’t Los Altos have a rule or guideline for how much of a traffic increase created by projects (e.g. the proposed Rosita Park Aquatic Complex or the proposed Pinewood lower campus expansion) would require mitigation like other cities? - Eric Lutkin.

“Los Altos does use accepted traffic engineering practices of measuring intersection levels of service,” said Los Altos Community Development Director James Walgren. “If a proposed project is projected to generate enough traffic to decrease the intersection level of service, then either traffic mitigation is required to correct the decreased level of service or the project may not be approved.

“While the proposed Pinewood school would have generated new car trips, they would not have been significant as defined by the California Environmental Quality Act or Los Altos’ own General Plan. The school did agree to make their expansion contingent on implementing a city-monitored ride-sharing program.

“The Rosita pool project will generate new car trips, but also did not affect the level of service of neighborhood intersections. One of the ideas the city’s traffic commission is looking into is the adoption of an ‘environmental,’ or perceived, traffic threshold versus a capacity or level of service threshold. The idea would be to try and quantify when levels of residential traffic are perceived by residents living on that street to be excessive.”

What traffic-calming measures can we do in the future to keep the rural feel of Los Altos? I like the look of the raised bulbs and planting areas calming traffic on El Monte (approaching Almond from Foothill Expressway). In contrast, the traffic-calming measures on Berry are not rural in feel at all - too much white concrete and curbs for my taste. - Laurel Iverson.

“I frequently hear the term ‘rural’ applied to Los Altos. I have come to realize that there is nothing rural about the volume and speed of the traffic on Los Altos streets,” Crook said. “Early observations from two traffic officers (at the El Monte location) indicate little change in vehicle speed with the ‘gentle approach’ used at this location. The measures installed on Berry Avenue are certainly more ‘in your face,’ but the impression has been that excessive vehicle speeds have been reduced. My sense is that most residents would like to see vehicle speeds calmed on their streets but are generally unwilling to change their streetscape to accomplish this goal. The city of Mountain View employs a more aggressive traffic-calming approach than Los Altos, but there is one key difference - the city does not consider itself rural.”

As someone who has been following the traffic debate for a few years, I would like to find out if police enforcement has had any measurable effect on the speed of traffic on Los Altos streets. My understanding is that it has not. - Douglas Mac-Leod.

“Traffic enforcement can have a dramatic impact on the speed of traffic on a given roadway, but the impact tends to quickly dissipate if enforcement ends,” Police Chief Bob Lacey wrote. “Numerous traffic and engineering studies support the evidence showing that traffic enforcement can be a successful deterrent to speeding drivers.”

Only two traffic officers service all of Los Altos, and “the city’s limited revenues prevent a significant increase in enforcement,” Crook said. Butler said he issues nearly 100 tickets a month and has never had one overturned. But he said the 85th percentile rule is “very, very frustrating. I would rather have the higher speed limit with its being enforceable than the lower speed limit without anyone obeying it, with no bite to it.”

According to Ho, in 2002 Los Altos decided arbitrarily to lower collector street speed limits to 25 mph. “As a result of that, our police officers gave tickets to speeders, but the court system rejected those tickets, so now our officers don’t enforce as frequently as they should,” he said.

Riffle said that enforcement was only one of three traffic safety measures - education and engineering are also important. Radar speed signs can inform careless drivers of their speed, and engineering devices force people to slow down. And with enforcement, “a ticket really makes it stick.”

In the wake of the fatal pedestrian accident on San Antonio Road earlier this year, what would be the most effective, expedient way to bring some traffic calming to the area in question? - Town Crier.

Eight pedestrian crosswalks traverse San Antonio Road, and residents jaywalk at many other locations. The four-lane, 35-mph road serves as a major thoroughfare, with big trucks and a high volume of vehicles. Faded crosswalks and foliage can obscure pedestrians.

The city repainted the crosswalks in November and plans to install four in-pavement yellow flashing warning lights at key pedestrian walkways.

One light has been approved for the intersection of San Antonio Road and Pepper Drive. Ho is designing the project and expects to complete it early in the new year. The other three crosswalks are subject to analysis, meetings and debates as the seven possible locations are weighed. According to Ho the council has not made a commitment of funding for the lights, each of which about $30,000. He expects the development of the other three to take several months.

What are the current problem traffic areas/intersections in town, and what is being done to address them? - Town Crier.

Lacey said that the 10 most dangerous intersections within the city were all located either along Foothill Expressway or El Camino Real, where traffic levels are at a maximum, according to a recent police department analysis.

According to a report from Ho, Fremont Avenue between Truman Avenue and Fallen Leaf Lane has had the highest number of reported incidents for a nonarterial street with eight reported accidents in three years.

Other areas that are high priority for traffic-safety improvement include Grant and San Antonio roads and Miramonte and El Monte avenues. Streets adjacent to local schools such as Almond Avenue and Newcastle Drive are also of concern.

A grant application for school intersection improvements is pending with the state, one for radar signs has already been approved, and lighted crosswalks on San Antonio, paid for from the General Fund, are in the planning stages.