What's Happening?

Traffic Study Underway!

One of the requirements imposed on Stanford to help balance the effects of all the development they will be doing in the next decade is funding to help with a traffic study in College Terrace. A group of devoted volunteers, the College Terrace Traffic Study Advisory Group, is working closely with the city staff to develop a baseline traffic count before the new graduate student housing opens this fall. This count will be focussed particularly on cut-through traffic - people who use our neighborhood streets to avoid the congestion on major arterials such as Page Mill and El Camino.

First, a big thank you goes to the 56 College Terrace residents who helped collect data on cut-through traffic in our neighborhood recently! These folks all took from 1.5 - 7.5 hours out of their busy lives in order to record the last 4 digits of license plates on all cars crossing into or out of a "cordon line" around College Terrace. [To see exactly where these counts were done, please check the Traffic Study Map]

What will we learn from this data, once it is analyzed by the city transportation staff? We will find out what percentage of the cars on each street has neither a local origin nor a local destination. We will also learn which cut-through routes are more used than others.

A second step will focus on more standard traffic measures, e.g. how many cars are using our streets and how fast are they going? These will be collected this week by Baymetrics, a well-respected traffic data analysis firm used by the city. You will notice rubber hoses in various spots, as well as people with counters during peak periods at several intersections.

The purpose of all this data collection is to give us an accurate baseline, against which we can measure any future increases that might be due to the growth that's taking place across Stanford Avenue to the north and California Avenue to the south.

If you'd like to share any comments or questions with the Traffic Study Advisory Group, please send them to Kathy Durham, President, College Terrace Residents' Association

Stanford - the next decade

Although it's not just about traffic, Stanford's proposal to add more than 4 million square feet of development in the next decade will certainly impact our traffic situation. Please check our Stanford page for more information.

Petition

This whole effort got started in 1999 when we circulated and submitted a petition asking the City to do something about calming our traffic. Although they did not have funding to do a through traffic study in this neighborhood in the current fiscal year, we did receive draft data from the City on traffic volume and speed in our neighborhood. The speed numbers are 85th percentile values. This means that 85% of the cars were moving at or below the number and 15% were going even faster! (It's the standard way traffic engineers measure speeds).

Meeting

A task force of residents met a number of times over the winter to discuss ways in which traffic in College Terrace might be calmed. On February 27, a neighborhood meeting was held at Escondido School.

Patrick Siegman, a traffic consultant, presented some slides showing the kinds of calming measures in use these days. Residents then discussed various possibilities in small groups.

Most folks seem to agree that there is a problem with cut-through and speeding traffic in College Terrace but there isn't consensus about what could or should be done about it. The noise caused by speed humps worries most folks, while roundabouts and devices that narrow the lanes seem to be more popular. Other suggestions included switching the barriers between currently open and currently closed streets (let's hope we can do better than that - let's make it better for EVERYONE not just shift the problem!). It's going to take us a while to find a solution that fits our needs!

City's Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program

Meanwhile, the City has created a new Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program. This is a huge step in the right direction although it's still underfunded and mostly designed to do "spot" fixes, not true neighborhood calming. The City Council also insisted that it should focus on safety rather than quality of life issues.

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