Sebastopol Planning Commission recommends a return to two-way streets in downtown, Part 1
The commission's decision and the consultant's recommendation arrived at the same place from different directions. Both drew on parts of the plan preferred by the public.
This is Part 1 of a two-part article. See Part 2 here.
The Sebastopol Planning Commission pushed the way-back button last night—or maybe the way forward. After a long discussion and lots of public comment, the commission chose to recommend “Alternative 4: Totally Two-Way,” which would convert both Main Street, Petaluma Avenue and McKinley in front of Whole Foods to two-way streets.
In a recent survey, Sebastopol citizens had preferred ‘Alternative 3: Walkable One Way,’ as did the Fehr & Peers consultants. During the meeting, the Planning Commission added the pedestrian and biking amenities from Alternative 3 to Alternative 4, creating a new hybrid option, which you can see in Part 2 of this article.
To be clear, this is not a done deal. The Sebastopol City Council will take up this issue at its March 3 meeting, at which they will choose their preferred design. They don’t have to follow the advice of the planning commission, though they often do. Fehr & Peers will create a more detailed design based on the council’s decision. That will then come back to the planning commission and then the city council once more for a final decision in April or May.
Some quick background
Rubendall kicked off the evening with a breakneck review of the Caltrans Sustainable Transportation Grant process, beginning with this basic fact: In a 2023 study from the California Office of Traffic Safety, Sebastopol ranked worst in overall pedestrian safety and 9th from the bottom in overall traffic safety, compared to 73 other similarly sized California cities.
Rubendall explained Sebastopol’s downtown dilemma in terms of a balancing act of “movement versus place,” noting that a street can either be geared toward moving as many cars through as quickly as possible or it can be designed as a place where you want people to gather, shop, and live.
“It’s a constant teeter-totter of how you balance those needs,” he said, noting that Caltrans had recently adopted a streets design standard called “Complete Streets,” which uses the city of Sebastopol as its model of a typical rural downtown community.
“It includes a variety of appropriate priorities and design standards to really understand how best to make this safe and comfortable for people, and understand which modes of travel, whether you’re walking, biking, driving in a truck or in a bus—how you prioritize those different folks. We’ve been following that guideline throughout this study in developing the ideas that we’ve been sharing with you.”
These design considerations suggest that rural main streets, like Sebastopol’s, emphasize the movement of people first, followed equally by personal cars and bikes.
Four alternatives and survey results
As discussed in previous articles, Fehr & Peers consultants developed four alternative street configurations: two 2-way and two 1-way.
Here was the iteration of those alternatives presented last night:
Over the last month, Fehr & Peers gathered responses in an online survey about which of these four alternatives people would prefer. They received 646 responses. Given a Sebastopol population of roughly 7,500 people, that’s a response rate of 8.6%. Here are the results of that survey:
The winner here is obviously “Alternative 3: Walkable One-Way” at 34%, followed by “Alternative 1: Fine Tune Today,” another one-way solution, at 25%. All in all, 59% of survey respondents preferred a one-way solution, while 41% of respondents preferred a two-way alternative, including “Alternative 4: Totally Two Way” at 23% and “Alternative 2: Test the Two Way” at 18%.
Public comment
The two-way option seemed to be favored by a narrow majority of those who spoke during public comment, even though several acknowledged that that would worsen traffic congestion downtown.
Architect Lars Langberg, chair of the city’s Design Review Board, threw his weight behind the two-way alternative.
“The cues that a one-way street give are to drive fast, to go from here to there, not to stop, not to go right or left…So the solution is a two-way alternative,” he said. “The Totally Two Way I don’t think is the perfect solution but is by far the best solution to achieve a downtown that’s focused on pedestrians.”
Steve Pierce reminded everyone about the history of this choice. “I think we need to go back to why our town originally went from two-way to one-way,” he said, recalling the elections supporting a switch to one-way traffic in the mid-1980s. “The two big reasons were there were a lot of accidents as people were turning left into oncoming traffic, primarily at Highway 12 and Main Street. The other, probably even bigger reason was the traffic that got pushed out into the surrounding residential areas. I’m talking about Murphy, Ragle and Florence.”
Other public commenters just weren’t having any of it. Lindsay Kvam called all four alternatives “utopian traffic social experiments.” Daryl Miller reminded everyone that the reality is that Sebastopol is at the crossroads of two busy highways. “You’re not going to change that by changing a bunch of lanes or building some sidewalks. Live with it. Enjoy where you live.”
Several speakers, including Elliot Marshall and Larry Badiner, an urban planner with 40 years of experience, urged the commission to focus less on traffic and more on making downtown a livable place. “I think we need to focus on making downtown a better place to walk, to do business and to shop,” Badiner said. “We should worry less about throughput, which is not the most important thing, I think, as we look to the vitality of Sebastopol.”
Kyle Falbo seemed to think two-way streets would be the best way to accomplish a more livable downtown but agreed it would ultimately make traffic untenable.
“We will have an opportunity to force the hand of the county and Caltrans down the road by slowing traffic so hard in Sebastopol that they are forced to come up with a bypass solution on their own,” he said.
One-way advocate Lisa Pierce’s response to the oft-repeated desire for a bypass was “Don’t hold your breath.”
See Part 2 here.
The last couple weeks have been a turning point for Sebastopol—and not a good one.
In a single vote, four members of our City Council approved allowing anyone to place a manufactured home in their driveway and rent it or make it a condo and sell it for profit, promoting it as “affordable housing” and “generational wealth.” Nothing prevents corporations from buying up properties, putting a mobile home on the driveway and flipping it. They chose not to discuss permitted design standards that might maintain the character of our city.
In that same meeting, they chose not to discuss but voted to approve Low Barrier Navigation Centers in single family residential areas, including near the high school and downtown. The Piazza Hotel lot could become a homeless shelter with trailers, tents, or container units housing residents that by law can be active substance abusers or have criminal backgrounds.
An agenda item on the Sebastopol Commons continued the troubling trend. What began as a new library has evolved into a health services center for underserved populations—despite data showing those populations largely do not live in Sebastopol. These decisions are steadily turning our town into a regional homeless services hub for Sonoma County.
Meanwhile, the Planning Commission has dismissed years of community input and consultant work by approving the idea of two-way streets downtown. While the stated goal—creating a place where people want to gather, shop, and live—is admirable, nearly half of survey respondents recognize the traffic problems this would create.
Those of us who rely on Highway 116 already face daily gridlock. Getting out of our neighborhood often requires playing chicken to join the flow of traffic. Going to town is often impossible. Maybe people who would like to shop locally, shop elsewhere or detour to Santa Rosa.
All of this is happening while our police department has to deal with more crime, street conditions are the poorest in the county, and the city’s financial challenges remain unaddressed. Pedestrian safety is cited as the core concern, yet it’s hard to see how confusing two-way streets and increasingly frustrated drivers will make anyone safer.
A small group is making big decisions, and they are getting them wrong. Sebastopol’s character has changed — worse traffic, more homelessness, and declining infrastructure all at the same time we pay the highest sales tax and water rates. Residents deserve better planning, clearer priorities, and leadership that listens.
This makes me so angry. Why do they even do a survey if they have no intention of listening to us?!! They need to work with Caltrans to reroute 116 and 12. Once that happens it would be reasonable to add bike lanes, create more parking, add parklets to their hearts content. Until that happens they need to Stop adding bike lanes. Cars and trucks make up the vast majority of the traffic, cyclists do not. Adding bike lanes, removing vehicle lanes and parking places are just making the already horrible traffic worse and worse and more dangerous. Why would a commuter stop to shop or dine when they can't find a place to park and the majority of their focus is just trying to get through town? The bike coloration is loud and pushy but that is no reason they should be allowed to bully everybody and everything to suit them.