El Camino Real Design Study Workshop

by Ned Farquhar and Doug Moran

El Camino is typical of what has happened in many cities: With population and traffic growth, thoroughfares turned from main streets into barriers separating sections of cities, in large part because the engineering of those streets focused almost exclusively on moving traffic. An alternative approach has developed, labeled "Context Sensitive Design", that has replaced the one-size-fits-all design templates used by traffic engineers with flexibility to accommodate local situations and requirements. Successes of this approach in a number of cities across the country led CalTrans (California's Department of Transportation) to explore its use, and Palo Alto won one of the initial grants. However, El Camino's traffic is two-thirds larger than any other street on which this approach has been tried (50,000 vehicles per day vs. 30,000).

City staff and the traffic engineers have been meeting with an Advisory Committee composed of representatives of various civic groups, including neighborhood associations. The first public meeting was held on Saturday June 1 and was advertised as a "workshop" but was more a presentation with Q&A. A second public meeting will be held in September.

The order of the various components of a potential redesign and the amount of time spent on them in the meeting was not representative of their true importance. The basic requirement is that the ability to handle traffic must be maintained or improved (relative to current levels). The Engineering firm hired as consultants has a traffic simulator that they demo'ed. For some of the intersections we are very familiar with, it did an excellent job, and for others, it showed the problems, but understated the severity (for example, on north-bound El Camino at Page Mill, the backup never extended to Olive, much less past it). The engineers were very interested in this information about the accuracy of their model.

A major concern of the study is making El Camino more pedestrian-friendly. One measure would be to make the islands wider, providing pedestrian refuges. Another would be to make the sidewalks wider. This could be done by narrowing the traffic lanes -- they are wider than current standards call for.

Wider islands and sidewalks provide opportunities for improved landscaping. However, many businesses along El Camino are already largely invisible to passing traffic and improvements to landscaping should not worsen this situation. One of the controversial issues is that some participants see improved aesthetics as a top-level goal of the study, others (such as us) see it as a method for implementing other goals (and hence subordinate to those goals).

A major goal of the BPA and other neighborhood associations on the Advisory Group is to make El Camino a much more conducive environment for neighborhood-serving businesses, but currently this is only implicit in one of the Study’s original objectives. However, one side-effect of this Study has been to heighten City staff’s awareness of the problems faced by these businesses.

Some of the designs under consideration would narrow El Camino from 6 lanes to 4 in various stretches. The traffic simulations show that this should be possible with better management of traffic flows (intelligent control of traffic lights). However, this has been met with a lot healthy skepticism from both residents and City staff (as have several other parts of the proposals). Multiple groups, including the BPA, are advocating an incremental, show-me/try-before-you-buy approach: for example, implement the improvements for traffic flow and use the resulting observations and data to determine whether lane reductions are feasible.

Bike lanes and mass transit are areas of contention. Most of the current designs provide for bike lanes, but there are questions about whether it would be better to encourage bicyclists to use the parallel bikeways (Park Blvd in this area). Light rail is provided for in one of the designs, but light rail is well over 10 years away (if then) and many argue that the CalTrain corridor is the proper location for non-local services (beyond express buses).

The City is hoping to put a wealth of background information on the Web in a month or so. At that time, we will provide a more extensive summary and a critique on the BPA-News@bpaonline.org e-mail list.

Although some of the ideas coming from this study will not be implemented for years, one of the study's goals is to identify improvements that can be implemented economically in the short-term. Remember, the City is likely to prioritize items that have the most visible support from residents, so it is important to respond when the City asks for public participation.