A city traffic engineering study is underway that could result in the constriction of one of Santa Barbara’s most important intersections, an intersection at the gateway to the vital Upper De la Vina commercial district. The district itself has over the last several years suffered a slow deconstruction from a series of uncoordinated land use and traffic planning decisions by city agencies that seem at times more interested in making symbolic gestures to favored constituencies than in solving mundane problems such as how the semi-trailer trucks that bring us food and other supplies are to negotiate our ever narrower, purposely congested streets.

Expect the Transportation Division of Public Works to come forward with a plan by the summer of 2007 to eliminate the “free right turn” from inbound State Street to De la Vina (the gently curved turn at MacKenzie Park), and replace it with a conventional, signalized “tee” intersection. At the October 31st, 2006 Santa Barbara City Council meeting, council members unanimously endorsed staff’s recommendation to study “improvements” at this intersection. Ostensibly, staff needed council approval for extra funding to hire an outside engineering firm to do the actual research and design work. Not incidentally, the council resolution may be a handy additional argument should Transportation’s eventual plans provoke opposition.

Adding a stop light where there is now an unimpeded flow of traffic will create more traffic congestion, and at one of the city’s busiest intersections. Why would they want to do this?

For three reasons:

First, the elimination of this convenience for motorists has been a goal for some time of the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition, and given the prevalence of Bicycle Coalition advocates throughout city government, Bicycle Coalition goals become city goals almost as a matter of course. The Bike Coalition claims that the free right turn is hazardous for cyclists continuing straight on State Street. They don’t say how many such cyclists there are (we’ve counted about 10 bicycles per hour at the peak, late afternoon traffic hour, with an average of 6 continuing on State and 4 turning on De la Vina), nor why a cyclist’s looking over his shoulder to check traffic at this intersection is any more difficult than checking cross traffic at other intersections. (Another question: Why aren’t more cyclists heading downtown on De la Vina, taking advantage of the free right turn themselves? After all, the Bicycle Coalition succeeded in 1998 in getting the city to convert two traffic lanes on busy Upper De la Vina to bike lanes.)

Second, the city through its piecemeal planning process has created several new traffic hazards at what was once a smoothly functioning intersection. In 1998, the city approved a lot split at 3025 De la Vina (the tenant then was Jordano’s Marketplace), and allowed the construction of a new, 12,000 square foot commercial property (now the Santa Barbara Surgical Center) in what was then the far end of the Jordano’s parking lot. This effectively cut parking at Jordano’s by more than 50%, which was not a huge problem until December, 2003, when a wildly popular Trader Joe’s branch took Jordano’s place. The city also approved another attraction—a new coffee shop (Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf)—on the opposite corner of De la Vina around the same time, also with an undersized parking lot. The effects were predictable: Increased pressure on on-street parking, employee parking in the nearby Samarkand neighborhood, and intermittent gridlock at Trader Joe’s. At peak hours, lines of cars sometimes extend into the traffic lane on De la Vina as shoppers wait for a parking space, and a line of brake lights then greets the motorist coming around the free right turn. (We hasten to add that these problems are not the fault of Trader Joe’s, the Surgical Center, or the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, all of which provide services Santa Barbarans want, and all of which are responsible corporate citizens. The fault is with the city’s broken transportation planning process.)

And third, as incredible as it may seem, there is within the Transportation Division a group of utopian planners and social engineers whose goal is to “get people out of their cars,” and who have come to believe that the only way to do that is to make driving so unpleasant that people will eventually give up and use alternative transportation. That few customers of Trader Joe’s or the Surgical Center are likely to ride bicycles to either destination seems not to impress the planners. The planners only know that cars are bad, and so motorists must be made to suffer until they see the light. Making intersections more congested, eliminating parking whenever possible, and approving projects with insufficient parking—all of these are, for the planners, painful but necessary steps to a bright future.

Or, as we at Santa Barbara Safe Streets see it: Deconstructing our streets, one intersection at a time.