The Caltrans Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant is coming into the final stretch. The planning commission made a recommendation to the city council at our last meeting and the city council will decide whether to go along with the commission’s recommendation or not at their meeting on March 3rd.

After receiving a lot of public comment, both written and in person at the meeting, hearing the staff report and the consultant’s recommendation, the commission decided to recommend moving forward with a blend of two of the presented alternatives. There has been a little post-meeting debate about how exactly we blended the Alt. 3 ‘ Walkable One-Way’ and Alt. 4 ‘Totally Two-Way’ alternatives. But in my mind, we adopted the ‘Walkable One-Way’ which has a lot of great pedestrian infrastructure improvements, but we want to make it two-way.

The consultant had suggested adopting the ‘Walkable One-Way’, with the idea that we could work toward making it two-way eventually. My concern with this approach is that it kicks the can down the road of making a decision about restoring the two-way circulation system. I believe I even said something to the effect of ‘let’s rip off the band-aid now and make that decision’, in the meeting. If the restoration of the two-way streets is problemmatic, we can convert it back to the one-way couplet system.

I believe the restoration of the two-way circulation creates a number of important improvements over the one-way couplet system.

Safety

Nationwide there were 39,345 road fatalities in 2024. Pedestrians accounted for 7,148 deaths and bicyclists for 1,166 (a record high). There were many more injuries, some of them life-altering. The fact there is not more attention paid to eliminating road fatalities is remarkable. Our auto-oriented transportation system is literally hazardous to our health.

There has been a lot of discussion amongst members of the public over which system is safer. The opponents of the two-way circulation say that the number of accidents dropped dramatically after going to the one-way couplet. As the traffic engineering consultant pointed out in the planning commission meeting, Sebastopol ranks near the bottom in traffic safety statewide when compared to jurisdictions of similar size. This doesn’t make the current system sound particularly safe to me. And a number of studies have shown that two-way streets reduce vehicular speeds, which is a significant cause of crashes. And higher speeds are obviously more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.

Risk of Pedestrian Death as Related to Traffic Speed.  This graphic comes from the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center which adapted it fromSource: Data from Tefft 2013; Figure modified from: https://visionzeronetwork.org/resources/safety-over-speed/, which got the data from a AAA Foundation study.

Caltrans has their own planning documents that suggest Sebastopol should consider restoring the two-way streets to improve the pedestrian environment. The following are from the Caltrans ‘Transportation Concept Report State Route 12 (West) District 4’.

There is also the very real impact of cars driving the wrong way on downtown streets. The one-way system is not intuitive and not what people expect in a small town downtown. I’ve learned to always look both ways when crossing a one-way street downtown because you never know when someone will be coming from the ‘wrong’ direction. I have also seen drivers make left turns from the right lane on S. Main street where there are two travel lanes in the same direction.

I aregularly have the experience of drivers coming out of side streets only looking one-way before make right-hand turns. I’ve done it myself. As a driver, you are primarily concerned with avoiding other cars. I mean, none of us intentionally want to hit a pedestrian, but pedestrians are often not in the front of our minds when we’re driving. When I walk up to a cross street I wait for the driver to acknowledge me before stepping off the curb, and it is surprising the number of times they never look my way.

It also is logical to me that with an entirely two-way street system, emergency vehicles have more direct routes to emergencies. As discussed below under ‘Flexible Street Network’ the totally two-way system allows options for getting to a specific destination which is limited in the one-way couplet system.

Equity

Nearly 1/3 of the people in our community do not drive. They are either too young, too old, disabled or poor. We subject those who cannot drive to an inferior transportation system. Making downtown more walkable, bikable and public transportation-friendly allows people who do not drive access to our downtown. We have a long way to go to make our transportation system more equitable, and the proposed plan for downtown Sebastopol is certainly not going to solve this issue, but it is a baby step in the right direction. By making walking and biking safer and more pleasant, more people will be able to take part in the social and economic center of our community.

 Progressive Planning

As I was considering the alternatives I also happened to be reading ‘Life After Cars‘ by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek. The following quote guided my thinking on this project,

20th century urban planning changed the concept of a street from a place to pass time to a place to pass through. 21st century planning is about reversing that mindset and prioritizing people living in a city over cars driving through it.

The one-way couplet system was the mid-20th century solution to ‘congestion’. It is a way to improve traffic flow, manage congestion and move cars quickly through our downtowns. It was originally applied to urban centers as a way to speed people between their downtown jobs and their homes in the suburbs, but quickly expanded across the country to large and small towns.

Many communities that implemented the one-way couplet system have since restored their two-way street networks. The one-way couplets generally result in higher speeds, which is what happens when you try to move traffic through a place as quickly as possible. The system clearly prioritizes cars, making more car-centric cities and giving drivers the message that they are the most important user of the public street.

Robert Orr writes on SmartGo in a blog post titled ‘A Pedestrians Reckoning with Car Centric Culture’,

Let’s stop designing streets only as transportation infrastructure and begin reclaiming them as shared spaces focused mainly on people, connection, community and humanity.

Sebastopol likes to think of itself as a progressive place. If we are truly progressive we will prioritize people and place over cars. That is 21st century planning. Let’s take back our city!

Flexible Street Network

The one-way couplet system often requires you to drive out of your way to reach your destination. If you are approaching downtown on one of the one-way streets, but your destination is on the opposite direction street, you generally have to pass your destination and then circle back on the other street. The northeastern quadrant of downtown requires people driving into town from the north to drive through the primary block of Main Street to Highway 12, turn left, and then turn left again to get to a number of destinations that are in that part of town. Places like the movie theater, the Barlow, the community center and a number of other businesses.

This also impacts emergency services. Police, ambulances and fire trucks also generally need to follow the street direction which could potentially delay their response time.

Allowing two-way traffic on all our downtown streets allows more direct routes to your destination. And if there is congestion and traffic on one of the streets, you have an option to go to the other street if they are both two-way. The flexibility is important. And this flexibility leads to reduced Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and Vehicle Hours Traveled (VHT).

This chart below outlines 11 circulation options that were in consideration at one time during the grant planning process. The top cloud highlights keeping the existing condition of one-way southbound Main St. and one-way Northbound Petaluma Ave. which has no change to VMT or VHT as this is the current system. The second cloud shows a 5% reduction in VMT and VHT if both Main St. and Petaluma Ave. are converted to two-way streets. So the arguments against restoration of the two-way system because of increased congestion appears not to be true, based on the modeling by the consultant. I imagine this is primarily due to the flexibility of the street network of a fully two-way system.

Road Versus Street

As defined by Strong Towns, ‘a road is an efficient connection between two places.’ Roads are designed so that you can safely travel in a vehicle at high speeds between places.

A street, by contrast, is ‘a platform for capturing value.’ A well designed street will maximize the value of adjacent development. Streets are important in cities and towns because the value the create is directly related to the city’s financial stability. A city makes money through the value of the properties located along its streets. The financial value comes from sales and property taxes and the social value comes from creating places to connect with each other.

Our Main Street should be designed to be a street in order to create value for our community. When we design Main Street to move cars through as quickly as possible, Main Street is turned into a road and we lose value. This is the scenario we have now and why downtown businesses struggle.

Downtown Events

Related to the flexible street network is the ability to close streets downtown for events. This is a big one for me. If streets are two-way, we can sometimes close them and there remains an alternative route through town.  We can close Main Street and have a festival. We could relocate the farmer’s market to Main Street. We could have music in the street every Friday night in the summer and the businesses could stay open late. We could close the streets around the plaza and allow events in the plaza to expand into the adjacent street(s). We could run a festival all the way down McKinley Street from Main Street through The Barlow knitting the currently separated commercial areas of downtown together. These are the types of community-building events that will improve the vibrancy of downtown. There are so many possibilities and none of them would be possible if we keep the one-way couplet system.

Business Success

I also truly believe that the two-way street network restoration will lead to a more vibrant environment that will support the success of our downtown businesses. Brick and mortar retail struggles to complete with online retail these days. It is so much easier to sit on your couch and order a book from Amazon than to go downtown to Copperfields. Successful commercial districts need to have a mix of businesses with unique offerings. And they have to offer a good pedestrian experience in order to compete with the inertia of staying at home. Your commercial district needs to be a fun, beautiful and safe place focussed on the experience of the person walking or rolling down the street. Sure, a lot of people may drive there, but it has to be designed for people outside of cars first. It needs to be a destination. And two-way streets get more eyes on your business as people drive by in both directions.

From Caltrans ‘Main Street, California A Guide for Improving Community and Transportation Vitality’ document, published in 2013

At the end of the day, I believe our downtown should be a place to drive to and not just a place to drive through. I understand we are at the junction of two state highways, but we have a choice in how we deal with that. We can give in to the voices of those who want to be able to drive through town as quickly as possible to get to their destination beyond Sebastopol, or we can support our town by creating a PLACE. Successful cities are made up of places where people want to be. We can be one of those places, but not if we continue to prioritize the throughput of cars over the experience of people.

The city council will be reviewing the planning commission’s recommendation at their March 3rd, 2026 meeting. 6PM at the Youth Annex.