Lets make progress on implementing safety for our community. You can help! Voice your constructive comments below and present your ideas or concerns.
At the beginning of July 2019, County agreed to implement a test of several long request safety improvements at the intersection of Santa Cruz and Alameda.
While bike safety changes were not implemented by County, the changes that were implemented are using temporary markings, bollards, and digital signs. This safety trial is testing many important safety improvements, including the following:
- Eliminate 5,500+ lane changes per day
- Move traffic lane away from the sidewalk and residential driveways
- Eliminate primary cause of the chronic NB red light running at this intersection
- Provide local residents a reprieve from traffic to safely access their driveways
- Help shorten a dangerous and long crosswalk
- Provide traffic calming to help slow excessive speeding (a 1st initial step in addressing this)
- Eliminate the chaotic traffic flow at this NB intersection, providing cyclists and motorists a calmer flow
- Eliminate tendency of motorists cutting in to the shoulder/park lane in the slip lane
- Traffic lights at this intersection will be ‘normal’, removing the dangerous speed differential between traffic lanes and allowing them to flow at similar rates
- Remove that short 3rd lane and the ‘always green traffic light’ that was the source of so many dangerous conditions
Goal of Configuration
The Safety Trial was implemented with temporary markings and lacked any bike safety enhancements. The goal, should the safety trail continue to be a success, is to provide a permanent solution that will provide a safety bridge until our Santa Cruz/Alameda corridor has changes to install permanent buffered bike lanes and sidewalks. The interactive graphic below is a proposed solution that provides safer bike lanes, clear motorists/cyclists guidance, and improves residential and pedestrian safety.
Below, to view before image and proposed solution, please drag the center control in the image to the left or right.
What You Can Do
Provide constructive feedback. Share your observations, ideas, or concerns. Our goal is solve the many serious safety issues in this corridor, including calming and slowing traffic to a safer speed. To create a more residential-neighborhood ambience instead of the current Expressway look-n-feel. To do this, please make comments below and/or send email to Safety@UnivPark.org, and/or fill out the County SurveyMonkey. Read thru comments by others and lets have some community discussion and friendly objective dialog.