City planning, especially when it deals with streets and traffic, is a whole made up of parts that can be as counter-intuitive as aspects of any other profession.
It is also one of those professions about which so many of us who are not in it have opinions, since we all have our own urban experiences.
The fact that the amateur opinions are not based on objective data is what gives the planners pause. There are two very common for-instances often noted by traffic engineers. When there is a traffic accident at a “Y” intersection, or when a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle while jaywalking across a broad boulevard, the amateurs usually suggest, in the first instance, a stop sign, and in the second instance, a painted crosswalk.
Wrong — perhaps dead wrong, the engineers often say. Stop signs can be blown through, they succinctly note. So can crosswalks. Both give other drivers and pedestrians a false sense of security that can be lethal. The best way to slow traffic is often to narrow a formerly broad street, taking away the visual notion that the driver is on the wide-open highway.
As a driving culture, and as a result of the perpetual gridlock Southern Californians face on their freeway commutes, locals are perhaps understandably zealous about their pet theories that bigger, wider streets are a must. That’s why, even though the paper has written before in recent years about the idea of parklets — small, sidewalk-adjacent new open spaces — on Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard, when the idea was floated again recently, many reacted with outrage.
While they are right in thinking of Colorado as Pasadena’s Main Street, and a boulevard famous around the world as home to most of the Rose Parade route, they are wrong in imagining that it is already over capacity with cars. Except for a few blocks in Old Pasadena, it is rarely a crowded street. With its four traffic lanes and one left-turn lane, it is already over-engineered — built for 35,000 vehicle trips a day, in a recent study it had just 24,000.
And as New Urbanist planner Jeff Speck said on a visit to Pasadena several years ago, Colorado’s 12-foot-wide traffic lanes are built for 75 mph. “What message are you sending drivers?” he properly asked.
Streets immediately to the north and south of Colorado are one-way and faster choices for drivers. What Colorado needs to become the heart and soul of a reimagined commercial city with room for pedestrian shoppers and diners — especially in the Playhouse District, where much more housing has been focused in recent years — is to go on a road diet, not to bloat up. Along with the parklets, and the narrowing of the boulevard, which feels way too wide for safe walking, the recent study suggests reverse angle-in parking rather than the current parallel curbside parking. Of course this adds parking spaces, as only the width rather than the length of the vehicle needs to take a space. It adds safety in two ways: Drivers leaving a space are looking ahead for cyclists and fellow motorists, rather than in a mirror, and sidewalk pedestrians and those sitting in parklets are protected by that much more steel.
When they realize the parklets would be both moveable, coming up for the parade, and a temporary experiment, to see how they work in real city life rather than in theory, perhaps outraged locals will join in the ongoing effort to make street life more like a walk in the park.
