Garberville’s Little Main Street Could Get Some Big Changes

Downtown Garberville could be in store for some big changes sometime in the next few years. The Complete Streets project was explained and discussed at a public input meeting Thursday, May 31 at the Redwood Playhouse. If funding is identified and obtained, the sidewalks will be rebuilt to modern standards with functioning wheel chair ramps and safe crosswalks. The number of parking spaces may increase, and the speed limit will almost certainly decrease. The County is beginning to design a “Complete Streets” project for the main street in Garberville, Redwood Drive. No other streets will be involved in the project.

Supervisor Estelle Fennell, business owner Josh Sweet and Project Manager Christine Anderson talking before the meeting began. [Photo by Kelley Lincoln]

On the 31^st, business owners, Rotary members and others were invited to a presentation by Christine Anderson who is a Project Coordinator with Mark Thomas, a civil engineering company with offices in 11 California cities.

According to Wikipedia,

Complete Streets is a transportation policy and design approach that requires streets [be built to]… enable safe, convenient and comfortable travel and access for users of all ages and abilities….[and to] allow for safe travel by those walking, cycling, driving…or delivering goods.

Christine Anderson gave a presentation before the group broke up and visited various tables which were staffed either by herself, Supervisor Fennell, or Humboldt County Engineering staff from the Public Works Department.

Anderson began by telling the room about coming to assess Garberville this past winter. Then she showed slides from three projects completed in other California cities, and then presented options for the Garberville project.

The Complete Streets project itself will only impact what locals would call “main street” and includes the roadway and both its sidewalks. It does not include Sprowl Creek Road nor any of the side streets.

In her remarks, Supervisor Fennel said that among the benefits of a Complete Streets project is the fact that the entire project has to meet compliance standards. The County of Humboldt remains under a 2016 Consent Decree with the United States government due to its wide spread non-compliance with the ADA.

However, the potential for changes to other streets in Garberville does seem to be in the air. A couple of business owners huddled with Supervisor Estelle Fennell after the meeting, looking at the map of Garberville and talking about the possibilities of making a one-way circuit around a single block to reduce congestion both in the alley on the west side of the Town Square and on Locust on its east side where Locust becomes too narrow for both two-way traffic and parking.

For the Complete Streets proposal, Anderson began by talking about her observation of Garberville’s activity and personality.

Perhaps because the dozens of townships and neighborhoods of Southern Humboldt are not visible from town, she was clearly surprised by the level of activity she saw in the little tiny town of Garberville. Anderson said,

This is a really vibrant, progressive community. There is a lot of activity. There is a lot of hustle and bustle; a lot of people moving about the space, a lot of cars, a ton of cars, and a lot of [people] parking.

I was kind of surprised because a lot of downtowns of this nature and this size say they need parking, but there’s actually no one parked there, but [here] people actually use the parking. So its actually really amazing to me.

Then she highlighted the details of the town that stood out to her,

There are a lot of interesting spaces going on. There’s a lot of hand made elements, hand crafted; there’s a lot of other things too, like I said, a progressive attitude as well. There’s electric vehicle charging stations. There’s no requirement to have those. ….That’s pretty interesting, and it supports tourism because if people know there’s electric car charging stations, then they are going to stop there.

However, Anderson also had a list of issues she found concerning beginning with the sidewalks,

There’s limited pedestrian facilities, there’s a good sidewalk, but there’s a lot of trip hazard on the sidewalk.

She repeated, “There’s a lot of problems with the sidewalk, it’s…” She trailed off looking for the right words. She then brought up a slide of the crosswalk at Feather Rose on Melville which terminates next to a rosebush and into a very tall curb on the west side of the street in front of the Lone Pine and said with a giggle in her voice,

A little bit about safety, ummm, we took this picture; I can’t even believe this; you know, we do have this thing in the world called the American’s with Disabilities Act, but how does a pedestrian actually cross a street into a shrub and get onto the sidewalk safely?

She mentioned other accessibility barriers that she observed.

There’s also poles in the middle of a [curb] ramp, … utilities at a specific grade so its not allowing [access onto the ramps].

Anderson then began to talk about the road and its characteristics,

Of course it’s a big, wide roadway. It’s 86 feet from curb to curb. That is a wide, wide road. So there’s a lot of opportunity in that fact. It’s a heavily traveled roadway.

The magnitude of the construction project being planned came into focus when she added,

It’s an old roadway that is difficult to maintain because it has what’s called ‘a concrete cap’ underneath it from the old state highway. There’s also need for serious underground infrastructure improvements. We already know that there is a lot of areas that have drainage at a high point instead of at a low point, so there’s problems in that area.

Referencing some driving behaviors she had seen and predicting how road conditions contribute to them Anderson said,

The wide street does favor traffic because people want to drive faster. We noticed that an awful lot of people coming off the northbound, into town, off ramp [do not slow down] until they get to the first intersection at Melville; then they [slow down hard,] then they slow down through the rest of [town;] then, when they get to Conger street, they speed up again. And in fact, [just before the turn down into Dazey’s Building Supply] there’s a 40 mph speed limit sign on [the right]side of the road and a 25 mph sign on the other. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s actually happening there.

Then with a sound of concern in her voice, she said, “We actually did see [people] jaywalking throughout the area.”

The needs of tourists arose frequently. Tourism is being courted by the Chamber of Commerce and the Visitor’s Bureau as an adjunct to the marijuana economy in hopes it will bring a new legal flow of buyers into the region.

Anderson said the signage needs work to help people find their way,

You wouldn’t think this would be a problem because it’s a straight roadway, [but] it’s really difficult to figure out how to get back on the freeway.”

 

Using a photograph of Redwood Dr. taken from the sidewalk up by the Woodrose, facing toward the Sprowl Creek stop sign, she said,

You can see for the middle one… [the sign to turn left to access the southbound 101] is obstructed by another sign and a tree.

Anderson suggested visitor kiosks,

Right now you have a nice thing that says “Garberville” [on the 101]. It would be really nice if the visitor could have someplace to stop safely and be able to understand and navigate where they are going, have a map, know where there’s [restaurants or fuel stations] instead of having to drive and look around for things. Because that makes for very difficult way-finding.

Her project map showed suggestions for placing such kiosks at both ends of town.

To give context and an understanding of what is possible, Anderson showed slides and explained three Complete Streets projects that she had drawn elements from for her design suggestions for Garberville. These projects were in Lancaster, CA, Seaside, CA and Pacific Grove, CA. Notably, all three of those projects were part of much larger downtown areas which provide multiple alternate streets drivers can take to avoid congestion. In Garberville, the only street parallel to Redwood Drive is Locust.

After showing slides of these example projects and very clearly explaining that nothing is yet set in stone and further assuring the audience that their input is important to the process, Anderson talked about the ways a Complete Streets project might look starting with the north and south ends of town,

What we’re thinking is, and it’s just an idea, is to use the Seaside, CA [model] where you have parking on both sides of the street, with bike lanes from the offramp on the south side to Melville Drive; then go into a Pacific Grove kind of scenario, where you have angled parking on both sides, and angled parking in the center from Melville Drive all the way to Conger Drive; and then go back to two lanes of traffic, bike lane on each side and parallel parking, with a 12 foot drive lane on either side from Conger to the north end of town. This would really slow traffic down. I propose that if you do this, right now the posted speed limit is 25, this would slow traffic.  In Pacific Grove, the speed limit is 15mph. This would slow traffic down immensely because they’d have to watch.

She explained the benefits of her suggestions,

It allows for bike lanes to come into the area and stop at Melville and Conger and Sprowl Creek Road. It also allows for visitors to really understand where they are…”

 

Pointing to the row of nose to nose angled parking between the opposing lanes of traffic, she said,

that central spine would allow for delivery vehicles, in time-limited [zones], could stop in that central parking area to make their deliveries.

And then she got peppered with feedback. People generally felt that trucks do not come to Garberville on a tight enough schedule to be allowing others to park there and block off the delivery trucks’ access.

Supervisor Fennell stood to calm the waters a bit. She said,

We are talking about parking down the middle,… with parking on the side as well….. [T]his is a town where people like to walk across the street without using a lights and all that sort of stuff, so if you’ve got just one lane to cross to get in the middle it’s much safer and more welcoming as a walkable community than if you’ve got a wide stretch that is essentially the width of a highway. So that’s part of making it more of a hangout downtown … Can we do that? Is that the right vision for Garberville? Or is Garberville going to remain just a pass through kind of place?

When asked if the traffic flow had been studied enough to count the number of cars passing through and to understand how much time a local driver from Shelter Cove or Alderpoint Rd. might need to get through town to access the Sprowl Creek onramp under such a scenario, Anderson said,

This project is to understand what kind of concepts there might be out there, to understand how we might be able to arrange the geometry of the space. Then the next phase would be to study the traffic, so any other environmental studies, [because] traffic is part of that environmental study and then [we will] do preliminary engineering. that’s all part of that next phase.

One of the County Public Works Engineers reassured the room adding,

[A] traffic study would focus on what the current traffic use is right now, what the number of [cars is,] and it would also project 20 years into the future what that traffic would look like. So if we were to make these lanes too narrow, in say ten years, it would be so congested that it would be hard to get people from the Alderpoint area onto southbound 101, but that traffic study is after this.

After the main presentation, people had a chance to speak with Fennel, County Engineers, and the project designer at a handful of tables. People gave their feedback verbally and in writing. The discussions were lively and interactive with people putting up post-it notes on the maps. Dennis O’Sullivan was concerned about the centerline parking from a firefighting perspective. He said that the broad street currently allows for fire crews to safely stage when they need to fight a fire.

Bootleg owner, Michelle Bushnel did not feel trucks had to deliver from the center line. She said she gets multiple deliveries a day, and she felt truck parking could be made available at each end of the block. She described a future with properly designed sidewalks on which hand trucks rolled safely and smoothly. And she added, “I cross the street a lot. I’ll feel safer if I don’t have to peek around trucks to [avoid] getting run over.”

Anderson and Fennell both repeatedly said that this Complete Street project will take a long time to move forward and that nothing will change this year and that there will be plenty of public input opportunities.

One significant hurdle to overcome will be funding. Anderson said,

But we need to make sure that this project, as well as any other project that comes along, has not only the funding for construction but also funding for longterm maintenance. Because if there’s no [maintenance] funding, this will be just a nicely constructed project that will fall apart.

Note: You can help by filling out this survey on Garberville’s Complete Streets Project. The survey will be open for a few more days. They’re trying to get feedback on the project. Here’s the link:

https://www.opentownhall.com/portals/131/Issue_7585