Street closures, lower speed limits and designated “school zones” with car restrictions during drop-off times are among the measures that make up Palo Alto’s new plan to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries.
These programs, and dozens of others, are included in the draft Safe Streets 4 All Safety Action Plan, a 173-page document that is now being vetted by local advisory bodies and which, if implemented, would transform how drivers, cyclists and pedestrians get around the city. The primary goal of the plan is simple: zero deaths. The plan also commits to designing a transportation system that “allows all road users to arrive at their destination comfortably and safely as they travel within and through Palo Alto.”
“We believe that humans are vulnerable and make mistakes. And we believe that an effective, proactive, holistic, and redundant system can prevent fatal and severe injury outcomes associated with those mistakes,” the plan states in the introductory chapter.
Bruce Arthur, who chairs the Palo Alto Pedestrian and Bicyclist Advisory Committee, said in an interview that the plan represents a shift in how the city is thinking about transportation.
“In the past we very much looked at what we can do to provide safer bike routes or pedestrian facilities,” Arthur said, speaking for himself and not for the commission. “This a much more holistic look at: Where do we have the most serious problems and what kind of education or funding programs can we use to address that?”
Some of the changes proposed in the plan are far-reaching and would affect just about every corner of the city. One calls for closing vehicle access near schools for 15 to 90 minutes, during drop-off and pick-up times, so that only pedestrians and cyclists can enter (vehicle access would only be allowed for residents living in the zone). The plan states that the program would be implemented at all schools in the city, with priority given to those in areas that have historically experienced more collisions.
Another plan would call for increasing the number of grade-separated bikeways across the rail corridor, a proposal that — depending on the alignment – may cost many years and a small fortune to implement. The council is already in the midst of planning for grade separations — a realignment of rail crossings so that roads and train tracks would no longer intersect — on East Meadow Drive and Charleston Road (a separate plan for a car underpass at the Churchill Avenue crossing has gradually dropped off the council’s priority list). The current south Palo Alto alternatives – an underpass for cars and a “hybrid” design that includes lowered roads and raised tracks – include bike facilities as part of the plan. The new plan calls for the city to go further in providing opportunities for cyclists and pedestrians to cross the tracks.
“In addition to the bicycle and pedestrian facilities that will be incorporated into the grade separations, up to two additional crossings will be pursued prior to grade separation construction to ensure safe crossing for bicyclists and pedestrians during construction,” the plan states.
One proposal is creating a program called “Palo Alto Open Streets,” in which streets would be closed to cars for events that the city would coordinate with local business groups.
Other programs are more technical in nature. The report also proposes getting rid of the “level of service” (LOS) metric that has historically been used to measure traffic impacts of new projects. This criterion measures the delays that drivers experience at key corridors and intersections, with “A” signifying smooth sailing and “F” connoting heavy traffic jams. While at the state level this metric has already been replaced by the “vehicle miles traveled” – which considers distance traveled rather than time spent waiting in traffic – Palo Alto has continued to use it for city projects to ensure that new developments don’t cause congestion.
The Safety Action Plan calls for scrapping LOS and replacing it with metrics that “focus on safety risk, user comfort and access for all users including pedestrians and bicyclists such as kinetic energy risk, level of traffic stress and travel time by mode.” In other words, the old paradigm assumed by default that very slow driving conditions are bad. The new one in some way reverses that thinking.
“Right now, we have city policies that don’t necessarily prioritize safety on our roads,” said Sylvia Star-Lack, the city’s transportation manager, at a recent public hearing on the new plan. “There are conflicting policies.
“We have policies that say adding delay to our roads is not OK. What if we had a safety project that adds delay to our roads? This provides a policy framework for the council to make that decision.”
It also includes a vast toolbox of “countermeasures” for the city to consider, including red-light cameras, prohibited (and protected) left turns, high-visibility pedestrian crosswalks; various types of bike lanes (green paint, buffered, fully separated). It also includes rapid flashing beacons that go off when a pedestrian crosses, a measure that may be particularly suitable, given that Palo Alto experienced 22 crashes at night (four of which involved a fatality or a serious injury) and that 95% of these collisions happened at intersections, according to the plan.
In reviewing the plan on Jan. 29, members of the city’s Planning and Transportation Commission broadly and enthusiastically supported the document’s goals and ambitions, even as they refrained from diving too deeply into the actual programs. Its main debate was over whether the target year for ending fatalities should be 2035 or 2040 (commissioners leaned toward 2035).
Commissioner Cari Templeton suggested that the city can’t start implementing the plan soon enough.
“We’re going to tell you we don’t want deaths starting tomorrow. Can’t wait until 2035,” Templeton told staff and consultants.
Most of her colleagues agreed, though Commissioner Bart Hechtman observed that some of the major engineering projects proposed in the safety action plan would take significant time and resources.
“Recognizing that the easier part is going to be rewriting the book of policies and programs — the hard part is going to make physical changes to roadways that runs throughout the city,” Hechtman said.
At a high level, the plan aims to create “layers of redundancy” that can function as a safety net for people trying to get around town. In other words, there would be enough protections in place so that even if a cyclist or a driver makes a mistake on the road, the damage wouldn’t be too severe.
Lowering speed through traffic calming measures and new speed limits is one such layer. The plan notes that 80% of roadway crashes in which a car moving at 40 mph hits a pedestrian result in a fatality; for those in which the speed is 20 mph, the fatality rate is 10%.
“Reducing speed is the one thing we can do to make us all safer,” Arthur said.
Ashlee Takushi, a consultant with Fehr & Peers, analogized the plan to a stack Swiss cheese slices, which are configured in such a way so that no two holes overlap.
“The holes in the Swiss cheese show weaknesses in each part of the system but when the slices act as layers or defenses and the holes aren’t lined up … a person is likely to be more protected,” said Takushi, whose firm worked with the city’s Office of Transportation to create the new plan.
The plan relied on analysis of the 1,313 injury crashes that occurred in Palo Alto between 2018 and 2022 and community feedback to create a map showing the city’s “high-injury network.” The map includes the El Camino Real corridor, which is now in the midst of bike lane additions, and Middlefield Road. It also includes University Avenue, east of Middlefield; Oregon Expressway; Embarcadero Road; and large segments of Meadow Drive, Charleston Road and San Antonio Road. These areas would be prioritized for safety measures.
While speed reductions will be a major component of the plan, Vice Chair Allen Akin acknowledged during the Jan. 29 discussion that these measures could have an unintended consequence of pushing traffic into other streets.
“If you succeed in pushing the speed on residential arterials down to 25 mph, you have just created a huge incentive for traffic to move into collector and local streets, which are also 25 mph and have fewer physical impairments to travel,” Akin said.
Other commissioners praised the project’s goals, even as they quibbled with specific elements of the new document, which is now going through the public review process. Commissioner Doria Summa broadly supported the safety action plan’s goals but suggested that much of the plan is too “fluffy” and “jargony,” with not enough focus on specific projects, which are buried in two appendixes.
“You need to put those things front and center and get rid of some of the jargony language,” Summa said.
Penny Ellson, a long-time bicycle advocate who serves on the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Commission, criticized the document for downplaying the importance of education and encouragement. It includes a diagram showing a “Safe System Pyramid” with “education” at the summit and “socioeconomic factors” at the base and suggests that the factors at the bottom are most effective and should be prioritized. Ellson suggested that the illustration is “almost hostile” toward education.
“I agree all the engineering improvements are wonderful but we learned in Palo Alto if you don’t teach a kid what that signal means that you put up, if you don’t teach them to be on the correct side of the road, if you don’t’ teach them to look left, right and left again, they’re not going to know to do those things and they’re not going be able to use these facilities,” Ellson said at the Jan. 29 hearing.
Enforcement must also be a key component, said Art Lieberman, who also serves on the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Commission. He argued that the goal of eliminating all traffic fatalities citywide is too ambitious for the Office of Transportation to tackle alone. Any effort to do so must include other departments, most notably Public Works and The Police Department, he said at the Jan. 29 meeting.
“As we know, just stating the laws is insufficient, laws must be enforced,” Lieberman said.
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.
