Quick Take
The Santa Cruz City Council is set to make a big decision Tuesday on whether West Cliff Drive should be a one-way street, writes Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin. But not only do too few people know about the vote, the data the councilmembers are using to get neighborhood feedback is also flawed, he says. He leans on his 26 years of experience on the Santa Cruz City Council to suggest that neighbors will not like the changes in traffic patterns and that the vote should be delayed.
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It’s not well known, but on Tuesday, April 9, the Santa Cruz City Council will be considering the approval of the 50-year vision plan for West Cliff Drive.
The plan is for one-way westbound vehicle traffic and separated bicycle and pedestrian paths for the length of West Cliff Drive from Bay Street to Natural Bridges State Beach.
We have all watched the major storms of the past couple of years erode significant portions of the cliffs along the road, and West Cliff is currently closed to cars between Columbia Avenue and Almar Drive. Thankfully, the City of Santa Cruz prioritized repairs to the eroded portions of the cliffs. This will help prevent more natural erosion that might put future use of the area at risk.
The results are not obvious to the casual observer, but the city’s public works staff has done an impressive job of getting funding to allow for the emergency repairs to proceed while discussions of the ultimate use of the area continue. Major storms and bouts with “atmospheric rivers” have hampered or made continuing work difficult. In some cases, staff have seen repairs wiped out before they were completed.
The city has engaged in a large-scale effort over the past couple of years to get public involvement in its 50-year planning, but the speed with which the process has unfolded might have left local residents more than a little unaware of what the city council will be deciding on Tuesday.
Of course, in the abstract, prioritizing active transportation like bicycles and pedestrian traffic sounds attractive – particularly for those with strong environmental concerns about greenhouse gasses and the climate change they create. However, there are consequences to reducing motorized vehicle traffic to one direction that, I believe, are not fully understood by city planners or their consultants. And those consequences are certainly not understood by many neighbors who will be most directly affected by them. (In the interest of full disclosure, living off Pelton Avenue, my street will see minimal impact whichever way the West Cliff vote goes.)
The tradeoffs might well be unacceptable once they are fully understood.
The city’s consultants did surveys of registered voters citywide, with the ability to disaggregate the responses of those the surveys designated as nearby neighbors of West Cliff Drive. What the surveys showed is that a clear majority of over 60% of citywide respondents favored one-way car traffic and enhanced bicycle and pedestrian facilities, while the nearby neighbors were fairly evenly divided between those who favored continued two-way traffic and those who would support closing down the eastbound lane of West Cliff Drive.
Unfortunately, there are two fatal flaws in the methodology of the surveys.
The first is that the map designating which residents are “nearby neighbors” is somewhat arbitrary and it leaves out neighborhoods closer to Bay Street, which would definitely be affected by diverting half of the car traffic off of West Cliff Drive and onto neighborhood streets. So the percentages of support and opposition to closing down one lane of traffic on West Cliff cited in the surveys might be quite different with a more appropriate designation of those whose homes and neighborhoods are directly impacted by proposed changes.
Second, the survey told respondents that the proposal to divert traffic off of West Cliff Drive would include various “traffic control measures” to address the negative impacts of increased traffic on their neighborhood streets. I know from a lot of experience (26 years on the Santa Cruz City Council) that there is a real difference between how people respond to abstract proposals to do something and the concrete plans that are actually being proposed as solutions.
While, again, in the abstract, the idea of creating a less car-impacted area along our coast with enhanced pedestrian and bicycle facilities sounds attractive to those of us with environmental values, it turns out to not be such a great idea if the cost is the destruction of the relative peace and quiet of a significant number of residential neighborhood streets.
In the city of Santa Cruz, perhaps one of the highest political values – supported by virtually every candidate for the city council over the past half-century – has been the protection of “neighborhood integrity.” It’s not hard to imagine how neighbors would respond to a detailed plan that shows which neighborhood streets will bear the brunt of the traffic diversions and how much traffic that will be day in and day out.
Like many neighborhoods in Santa Cruz, those on the Westside near West Cliff Drive endure periodic invasion of our quiet, livable neighborhoods for certain short-period events. On the Westside, periodic triathlons, surf contests, bicycle races and the like fill our streets with parked visitors, blaring music and amplified announcements and speeding outsiders who have little concern for the safety of our children.
As long as it happens only several times each year, this is an acceptable trade-off for living, as we do, in paradise. But if half of the traffic on West Cliff Drive is diverted into our neighborhoods 365 days a year and 24 hours each day, no amount of warning signage or traffic advisories will make up for the loss of streets that now allow for basketball hoops and other recreational amenities in our roads, quiet conversations among neighbors in the street, or the other qualities that make neighborhoods attractive and meaningful places for those who live there.
I am not sure why there is such a rush to approve a 50-year plan for West Cliff Drive, especially while the reconstruction and protection of the cliffs is still so far from complete. Why not have this discussion in front of the city council when we know the actual proposed traffic mitigation measures being proposed as part of the 50-year plan for West Cliff Drive and not a vague promise to address the issue sometime in the future?
I think the city council might get a more useful response to a survey on that plan than the data it has now on what the neighbors and others think about the future of one of the true treasures of the city of Santa Cruz.