Raised Pedestrian Refuge Emerges As Critical Issue – A critical issue now facing the council on the completion of the Fifth Street Design is the issue of pedestrian safety, in particular the median widths and the ability for the city to provide width to act as a safe pedestrian refuge while providing other features, including proper bike lanes.
Interest in providing a wider median area surfaced as a specific issue of some community members, and staff analyzed the impact of widening the median and returned to council.
Council has supported the idea of bike buffers and a striped 1.5 to 2 foot median.
Staff reported, “While staff are supportive of a bike lane buffer as a component of this project, with Davis Bicycles! now supporting their elimination and going to a 7-foot minimum width bike lane in order to provide a wider median area, staff is amenable to the elimination of this feature. With this change, an additional 1 to 4 feet of pavement width is made available.”
However, if medians were to be widened, staff believes they should initially be installed by striping rather than a raised curb, or other above ground feature.
While agreeing to that in the interim, Brett Lee pressed the council to look into raised medians in the long term instead of merely striping.
There are also questions about pedestrian crossing beacons and striping.
According to the staff report, “The ONDNA and DB! [Davis Bicycles!] proposal recommends eliminating the beacons at C and J Streets from the perspective that they don’t believe it is the best use of funds in the first phase. They acknowledge that it provides greater visibility and results in a higher compliance rate by motorists in yielding the right-of-way to pedestrians. However, they feel it more important to stripe both the east and west side crosswalks rather than just the one side where the beacon will be located.”
Council was not ready to act, but a number of residents came forward to express their views.
Sheryl Gerety, speaking for the Old North Davis Neighborhood Association (ONDNA), said that they have been seeking pedestrian safety for at least ten years and “we as a neighborhood are still very anxious to see those pedestrian islands built out at the end.”
She said that at their last several meetings there seemed a consensus on what it took to make the street safe and she is unclear as to how things got away from that consensus.
“We really thought we had both intersections marked at every crossing and the pedestrian islands,” she said.
Dennis Dingemans also supported the notion that both the east and the west crosswalks should be marked.
“Very important for the Old North group is the pedestrian safety priority that would be shown in having both the east and the west crosswalks marked on Fifth Street at each of the eleven intersections and to have some form of a raised pedestrian refuge,” he said. “Those are our two key issues. We think we heard from staff that those will happen.”
Several residents in Old East Davis expressed concerns that the area was not extending further east.
Rhonda Reed, for instance, told the council that the new configuration may improve the flow of traffic, but it also creates fewer gaps, “which means fewer opportunities for pedestrians to cross safely across the street. So it really emphasizes the need to have those median islands.”
She added, “But it would appear at least when you get down to old east Davis, where our trees narrow things down, that the plan is to lose those islands and that’s critically important.”
“It concerns me that you put an extra six inches to protect a bicycle but we can’t find a safe way to get people across the street,” she concluded.
Alan Miller, of Old East Davis, noted that the neighborhood goes up as far as sixth street and said that they are one neighborhood and it would be nice to be able to walk or drive across the neighborhood safely.
“I’m most concerned about safe pedestrian islands and very concerned about the idea of not having a raised median,” he said. He noted that the concern about left turns into driveways is misplaced, that there is a raised median elsewhere on Fifth and Russell and people manage to turn only one way and loop around. “I would very much like to see that that section was also safe.”
Doby Fleeman, owner of Davis ACE, noted, “Fifth Street trying to accommodate bicycles, pedestrians, and automobile traffic and safety vehicles is a delicate balance.”
“My real concern is best practices from a safety standpoint in terms of the width of the center island to do everything we can to avoid collision between mirrors on large vehicles and unsuspecting pedestrians taking refuge,” he said, after noting the potential that the new buses will be wider than the current ones.
Anthony Palmere, the General Manager at Unitrans, explained that there was a misunderstanding apparently from a couple of weeks ago, and clarified that there were no new wider buses coming.
He told the council, “The buses we have are as wide as they’ve ever been and they’re not getting any wider. They’re eight and a half feet wide and they have ten inch mirrors on each side and they can be extended to twelve inches which is why ten and a half feet is the standard used for how wide you need a lane to accommodate a bus.”
Jacqueline Clemens is an avid biker and she too favors the raised median.
“Striping is great, it’s better than nothing. But as a pedestrian or as a cyclist trying to get across a busy street like Russell, it just doesn’t feel like a protection like a raised island does,” she said urging them to create a raised median wherever they can.
Steve Tracy, speaking for Davis Bicycles!, said that the organization was “willing to give away the buffered bike lanes which we love, we love the idea of, and we want to see them on a street in Davis very soon where they fit.”
However, he explained that on Fifth Street, “space is tight here and compromise has been necessary.”
He believed he was coming there that evening to support the compromise, but felt that the staff report was sufficiently ambiguous to have some concern.
“I’m a bit unclear right now as I stand here,” he said. “Davis Bicycles! also recognizes that many bicyclists when crossing a street like this at an unsignalized intersection… will get off the bike and become a pedestrian and then acquire the rights for traffic to yield as a pedestrian has and then get back on their bike after they cross the street.”
“So there, refuges even at four and a half feet wide which is narrower than a bike, still become very important,” he said.
“What we were after and we thought was part of the compromise was seven-foot bike lanes throughout the corridor except between E St and G St. where fifth happens to be two feet narrower,” he said. He thought that in the wider areas that the bike lanes would get the extra foot, not the median. “Rather than have the median be excessively wide… some of that space could be given to the bike lanes.”
This could be accomplished without taking away any space from other uses. He also noted that at signalized intersections, the medians are not needed since people simply cross at the pedestrian light and therefore do not need the refuge.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
why is council dragging its heels on this?