Beyond bike lanes
A draft of the Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan awaits your comments
A new public document which may determine how bikeable and walkable Sebastopol will be in the future has been posted on the Sonoma County Transit Authority’s (SCTA) website. The initial draft of the Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan is now open for public comment, which is due by November 30. Between now and then, there will be a couple of public meetings—a planning commission meeting and city council meeting—where you can learn more about this plan and give feedback.
The Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan is basically an update to the Sebastopol Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, which was originally adopted in 2014.
The new plan defines active transportation as “‘human-powered’ modes of travel, like walking, biking or using mobility devices” and notes that “Creating an environment that encourages a shift from automobile trips to walking or biking trips also promotes improvements to mental and physical health, air quality, reduces noise, and improves social equity.”
The Sebastopol plan, which is part of the Sonoma County Active Transportation Plan, was started in the summer of 2023. The SCTA and its consultant Fehr Peers held several information-gathering sessions throughout the last year—at the Grange, the Sebastopol Farmers Market, the Apple Blossom Festival and the Sebastopol Planning Commission.
According to the document, public feedback revealed the following themes:
Biking: create more separated bike paths and better connections to existing paths;
Walking: close sidewalk gaps, widen sidewalks to provide sufficient width for all users, improve existing crosswalks, add new crossings, and treatments or education to increase drivers’ yielding to pedestrians;
Traffic calming: implement on collectors and residential streets, especially around schools;
Trails: improve trail access (closing gaps where they exist), expand connections to regional trail systems, and consider new trail projects, if feasible;
Destinations: create better pedestrian/bike access to and through downtown, and to schools;
Roadways: More active transportation improvements are needed along higher traffic roads such as Bodega Avenue, Sebastopol Avenue, Healdsburg Avenue, and Main Street.
Purpose and projects
The Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan has two purposes: 1) To create a bike and pedestrian road map for the city and 2) to provide a foundation for future funding requests.
“A lot of sources of funding, like grant funding, require projects to be listed in an adopted plan,” said Dana Turrey, a senior transportation planner with SCTA. “So there’s really a huge benefit to having all of these ideas in a plan and adopted to be able to actually get the funding to implement the projects that the community is requesting.”
The document proposes a list of 85 projects and then prioritizes them into three tiers, Tier 1 being the most important. (See page 16 of the plan for the full list of projects.)
“For Tier 1, we were really looking for projects that would make the most difference to the community,” Turrey said.
The map below shows where each proposed project will take place and also what kind of project it would be.
Some of the Tier 1 projects include adding multi-use paths (that is, paths that are totally separated from cars) along Ragle Road from Bodega to Covert Lane and on Analy Avenue in front of the high school. The rumored roundabout at Healdsburg Avenue and Covert Lane is also on the Tier 1 list, as are several projects which are already underway, like adding bike lanes on Bodega Avenue (something almost no one, including local cyclists, seems excited about), as well as the Caltrans-grant-funded “Sebastopol Main Street Planning and Redesign Project.”
“I love the idea of creating a multi-use trail along Mill Station from 116 to Ragle Road, then along the length of Ragle Road to Bodega Ave,” said Lauren Sprang, a Sebastopol Times reader, who has closely analyzed the new plan and submitted comments. Sprang is also intrigued by the idea of roundabouts.
“The prospect of mini-roundabouts or traffic circles anywhere in town is very interesting to me. I’ve seen these in Davis and Mountain View. I lived in Bend, Oregon, for several years, where the city has transformed many large intersections from four-way to roundabouts successfully. The roundabouts in Bend are more ambitious than what I imagine might be appropriate for Sebastopol. But I would love to see mini-roundabouts envisioned at various points around town, including the intersection of 116 and Covert, as proposed, and possibly also at the intersection of Valentine and Pleasant Hill, where there’s a lot of both car and pedestrian traffic, as well as the room for one.”
Not everyone is pleased with the plan
City council candidate Phill Carter, who is an avid bicyclist, found the document overly broad and not particularly actionable.
“It’s still a little bit of a black box to me,” he said. “But I’m showing up at the meetings and trying to be as involved as I can be, like giving ideas or suggestions.”
Carter said he was hoping for something more concrete.
“I was hoping for more. Even though the document will be broad—though it does leave some things open, probably intentionally—there isn’t a lot of usable research in it,” he said.
Design Review Board member Lynn Deedler, who has long been an advocate of an east-to-west bike trail that he calls “The Apple Blossom Trail,” was disappointed to see that that trail didn’t even make it onto the official list of projects—though the plan does devote a whole page to it (with an inaccurate map) as a future possibility. Its absence from the official list of prioritized projects, however, would make it very hard for the Apple Blossom Trail, which Deedler has been working on for several years, to get funding.
Some interesting tidbits
The new plan contains some interesting background information.
The plan notes that Sebastopol ranks fourth in the state among 74 cities of its size for the number of fatal and injury collisions. According to the report, “Between 2015 and 2020, traffic collisions resulted in one fatality and 27 severe injury victims. There were 12 severe injury collisions involving people walking or biking during this period.”
This is perhaps not so surprising given that two state highways (116 and 12) function as the town’s two main arterial streets. Nonetheless, the Sebastopol City Council has signed on to the SCTA’s Vision Zero, which is a regional commitment to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries through engineering, policies, and education. Many of the “traffic-calming” efforts described in the new plan are aimed at this goal.
The other interesting tidbit is how people who live in Sebastopol get to work. Census data from 2022 indicate that four percent of workers currently walk to work, zero percent bike or take transit, 66 percent use single occupancy vehicles, nine percent carpool, 17 percent work from home, and two percent take other means of transportation to work.
What comes next
Turrey said she and her team will be giving a presentation to the Sebastopol Planning Commission on Oct. 22 and to the Sebastopol City Council on Nov. 19. (Both of these meetings start at 6 pm and take place at the Sebastopol Youth Annex, 425 Morris St.) There will be an opportunity at both meetings to make public comments on the draft.
The final document will be presented to the Sebastopol City Council for approval in January or February.
You can also comment on the draft Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan without ever going to a meeting by going to the SCTA ATP webpage, and scrolling down till you see the Draft Plan Feedback Form. Comments must be submitted by November 30.
I do not ride a bike. I do like to walk and there are places in town and close to town that need sidewalks. I hope that bikable does not overwhelm walkable.
When I'm downtown and notice a car in one lane stopped at a crosswalk for a pedestrian, I frequently see the cars behind it whip around that car to pass it in the other lane, unaware there is a person in the crosswalk. My heart immediately leaps into my throat for fear that a person is going to be killed or injured.