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For years, drivers have treated a small residential street near Mountain View High School like a race track. Now the city is taking steps to close it off to cut-through traffic to curb dangerous driving practices.
In a unanimous vote, the Council Transportation Committee supported a recommendation to close Wasatch Drive to vehicles at Diericx Drive at their meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 29.
If approved by the City Council, the closure would be a first for Mountain View. Typically, the city uses other measures to reduce driving speeds and traffic on residential streets, like putting in speed humps, electronic signage and trees. But for residents living on Wasatch Drive, these measures do not go far enough to fix a problem that has persisted for decades, they say.
“We’ve worked with the city, and the city has installed an extra stop sign, and they put in 15 mph warning signs, effectively no change. So, what does change every year is that we get a new crop of inexperienced teenage drivers going to and from the high school,” said Charles Devogelaere, a Wasatch Drive resident of nearly 40 years.
Drivers often use Wasatch Drive, a L-shaped street, to bypass traffic at the intersection of Levin Avenue and Diericx Drive. The street becomes particularly busy during school travel times. Adding speed bumps and electronic signage would not deter student drivers, residents say, but rather would incentivize them to drive more dangerously to beat the traffic on the other streets.
Last year, city staff conducted field observations on Wasatch Drive and identified that 15% of the vehicles traveled at or above 32.7 mph, which is higher than the posted speed limit of 25 mph. About 70% of vehicles also used Wasatch Drive as a cut-through street, according to the report.
If Wasatch Drive is closed to cut-through traffic, then it likely would add about a 20 second delay to the Levin Avenue and Diericx Drive intersection, the report said.
About a dozen community members, with most living on Wasatch Drive, attended the Oct. 29 meeting in support of the street closure. Nearly all of them spoke about the number of collisions and near misses that they have seen on a street that was never meant to be a busy thoroughfare.
“We had one car come around the corner and hit the curve so hard in the corner that he broke the axle of the car he was driving. This is not speed-bump problems. This is dangerous driving problems,” said Cynthia Haines, a Wasatch Drive resident.
For the Council Transportation Committee, the public comments provided compelling evidence to back the street closure. “I came into this thinking, ‘Wow, closing a street is a pretty major step,’ but having heard more about it, I understand it and I’m supportive of it,” said City Council member Lisa Matichak.
Council member Ellen Kamei raised some questions about why the city was going to a street closure before implementing other solutions like speed bumps, but after hearing the comments, also supported the staff recommendation.
“This is not, as residents repeated over and over, a new issue. It’s an ongoing and persistent one that I think has resulted in the recommendation we’re seeing tonight, which is that there’s been so much inaction that we’re looking at closing a street for the first time,” Kamei said.
Still, Kamei expressed some concern about the city’s process and suggested the possibility of moving to a tiered response to address community concerns before getting to the point of street closures. “What can we do to be proactive so it never gets to that?” she asked.
Kamei also noted that there were no representatives from Mountain View High School at the meeting and stressed the importance of communicating with students so they would be well informed of the street closure at Wasatch Drive prior to its implementation.
The City Council will vote on the committee recommendation in December. If approved by the council, the closure at Wasatch Drive and Diericx Drive would be implemented in February with a 10-month evaluation period before making it a permanent installation. The committee also recommended that staff reevaluate its Safe Routes to School program for pedestrians and bicyclists, as they could be impacted by the closure as well.
Excellent. But also pathetic how long it took.
There are so many roads in Mountain View that are poorly designed and promote dangerous driving and nothing is ever done. Or you get pathetic quarter measures that do nothing but allow the people in charge to pat themselves on the back.