Celebrate “Street Smart Sebastopol” — Saturday, January 28, 2012

Late in 2011, Sebastopol saw the last construction on Phase 3 of its Street Smart Project.  Hurray!  Come experience the pedestrian-oriented features of this ten(!)-year effort.  On Saturday, January 28, 2012, Council Member Sarah Gurney will take you out on a circular route that will use each new crosswalk.  Meet at The Plaza at 9 AM for this “ribbon-cutting,” first-time-ever event. The route is a comfortable 2-3 miles, returning to The Plaza at about 10:30 AM, to go out in the reverse direction.  Walkers are welcome to join at either time and to do both walks, totaling around 5-6 miles and taking about 3 hours

Bring water, a snack, and a hat.

Leader: Sarah Gurney, member, Sebastopol City Council

For more information about the walks, please visit the new Sebastopol Walks website

 

Street Smart Crossings — Unintended Consequences?

Poster issued by the London, Eng. Metropolitan Police in 1868

I love our new Street Smart pedestrian crossings and I think it’s great that our very first Sebastopol Walks event of the year is a tour of all the improved intersections. One of the hopes for the project was that drivers would slow down as they came through town. City Council member Sarah Gurney reported that she now sees more pedestrians on South Main, which has often been pretty much pedestrian-free. That said, I do wonder if we are now training drivers on the main streets to stop only for the flashing lights. I don’t have any real data to back that up–only my experience–but I’ve waited at couple of the non-improved intersections as car after car goes across the crosswalk. I’ve also waited at the one intersection that doesn’t have in-pavement flashers (at Calder and South Main Street, which was the first one improved). I’d hate to think that our improvements might have made other intersections in town more hazardous!

Complete Streets Advisory Committee Inches Forward

At their January 18th meeting, the Sebastopol City Council looked at the draft ordinance that will create our Complete Streets Advisory Committee. With only a couple of minor changes, it will come back before the council for a first public hearing in early February and — with luck — finally come to a vote for adoption by the beginning of March.  Council member Patrick Slayter first introduced the resolution for creating a committee about a year ago; a subcommittee (Patrick Slayter and Sarah Gurney) drafted an ordinance; and then it went to the City Manager for transformation into “ordinance-ese” …nearly 4 years after Sarah Gurney began discussing the possibility of establishing an official bicycle/pedestrian advisory committee (optional for cities under 10,000 people). It’s been a long haul and Sebastopol Bike/Walk is eager to see it through.

Hunting for Recycled Materials

I am working on a small shed with my son and we took a trip recently to Daniel O. Davis  in south Santa Rosa to hunt for salvaged lumber.  January is unfortunately not a good time for hunting and the selection was disappointingly small…unless we’d been in the market for big glue-lam beams. While were staring at a couple of old windows small, another customer tipped us off to better hunting grounds at Windsor’s Industrial Reusable Materials.  What a great tip! We soon found ourselves in hog heaven and one of the workers commented that during demolition season, the selection is much, much better. We drove out of their yard a few hours later with a full pickup load of various pieces of lumber, a couple of windows and an old Sonoma County Transit bus stop sign (my son says he has plans for it) — all for the price of the sheets of plywood that we would have picked up at Friedman’s or Home Depot.

I wish I’d known about IRM when we were rebuilding our porch a couple of years ago. I’d hoped to use mostly recycled materials at the time, but finding the right materials in a timely fashion proved too difficult. The selections at Daniel O. Davis and at the lumber recycling facility on Mecham Road in Petaluma were poor. We ended up with a high percentage of new lumber.  We’ll be going back.