Santa Rosa council OKs bike boulevard

Santa Rosa’s City Council gave its unanimous go-ahead Tuesday to plans to turn a 1.5-mile stretch of Humboldt Street into the county’s first bike boulevard where cyclists and motorists will share the road equally.

The six-month experiment will involve adding traffic circles at four of the 14 intersections along the route, sidewalk “bulb-outs” at two other intersections with heavy pedestrian traffic and added signage to make the street as safe as possible, said transportation planner Nancy Adams.

The two-lane street would be turned into a bike boulevard where motorists and cyclists follow each other in single file, neither having preference over the other.

Councilman Gary Wysocky, who lives near the project area and is a member of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition that is backing the project, said motorists who now use Humboldt as a short-cut between Lewis Road and Fifth Street downtown won’t see much difference in their travel time even if they are stuck behind slower-moving bike riders.

“Drivers will find these annoying cyclists are only taking up 30 to 40 seconds of their time,” he said.

Wysocky, and about a dozen audience members who came to support the idea, agreed the trade-off for slower traffic is a residential street in the heart of the Santa Rosa Junior College neighborhood that will offer greater safety for all ages and levels of cyclists traveling across town.

“Safety is the No. 1 impediment to people getting on a bike,” Wysocky said.

Adams said cyclists and motorists would follow each other single file along the 25 mile-per-hour street but that motorists could pass slower-moving riders when there was no traffic in the oncoming lane.

The plan to eventually convert this stretch of Humboldt, traveled by between 2,800 to 4,800 cars daily, into the city’s first bike boulevard was added to the city’s general plan in in 2001.

It is viewed as a safer alternative for less experienced cyclists to travel across town or to neighboring schools, including Santa Rosa High School and Santa Rosa Junior College.

The other major biking route to the two schools, four-lane Mendocino Avenue located just two blocks east and running parallel to Humboldt, is traveled by up to 29,000 cars a day.

Dexter Street resident Howard Adler, among the neighborhood cyclists supporting the experiment, said, “We’re not asking for special treatment, we’re asking for a level playing field.”

But Howard Street resident Kay Tokerud, who lives a half-block from Humboldt, called the test project, which will cost $36,500 to implement, a waste of money.

She said her own observations, along with that of five others helping her monitor traffic on Humboldt for six hours Monday, found no conflicts between motorists and cyclists.

She noted that while all the “drivers obeyed the red lights and stop signs,” she said that cyclists often did not.

“They made very little effort to observe the traffic rules,” she said.

Adams said the temporary structures needed to implement the bike boulevard — signage, sidewalk extensions called bulb-outs and traffic roundabouts — should be in place by August.

After six months, the results will be reviewed and neighborhood meetings will be held to determine whether to implement a permanent project at a cost of $200,000, revise it or drop the idea.

Several council members indicated they likely will move ahead if the results are favorable. The city could end up adding more controversial measures that would make the boulevard even more bike-friendly, but at the expense of motorists.

Christine Culver, executive director for the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, said a true bike boulevard would include diverters, concrete blocks that would block traffic at various sections of Humboldt and force motorists onto side streets.

“The boulevard should give bicyclists priority,” she said.