County, at the urging of our community, agreed to implement the temporary trial to test the impact of the several important safety improvements gained by proposed changes. By creating a temporary road configuration to test the key tenants of the proposed safety improvements, to address several of the very serious and dangerous intersection design issues.
In short, the trial will provide many safety improvements and gather traffic data to see the effectiveness of the improvements:
- Eliminates over 5,500 lane changes per day
- Moves the traffic lane away from the adjacent sidewalk, providing safe pedestrian buffer
- Eliminates the primary cause of the chronic red light running at this intersection
- Provides local residents a reprieve from traffic to safely access their driveways
- Shortens a dangerous and long crosswalk
- Provides traffic calming to help slow excessive speeding (a 1st initial step in addressing this)
- Eliminates the chaotic traffic flow at this NB intersection, providing cyclists and motorists a calmer flow
- Slip Lane configuration eliminates the tendency of motorists cutting in to the shoulder/park lane
- Traffic lights at this intersection will be ‘normal’, behaving as all other intersections in the area
- Removes that short 3rd lane that was added just prior to the intersection keeping only the 2 primary NB lanes.
During the Safety Trial, Count plans on monitoring of traffic flow and speed. The key safety gains will be observed and monitored. Some of evaluation criteria is:
- By keeping 2 lanes of traffic and eliminating a short 3rd lane, evaluate the impact on NB traffic
- Evaluate the use of dedicated NB lanes, one each for Alameda and Santa Cruz
- Determine if the normalized traffic light is achieving the safety goals for Santa Cruz Ave residents
- Determine if the NB traffic flow to and through the Y intersection is calmer and observe if drivers are less distracted
Click this email link: Email County – it will automatically address email to Supervisor Don Horsely, County Manager Mike Callagy, Public Works Jim Porter, and our Safety email addresses.