Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Cal Trans speak crazy talk in Manila.

Cal Trans hosted a community meeting about traffic issues on Highway 255 from Arcata to Eureka tonight. There was a powerpoint presentation, and lots of nicely made up posters of potential projects and phases. They wanted to have a controlled forum where people had to speak one on one to either Cal Trans staff or Police enforcement. Divide and conquer instead of answering the community as a group and to the Peninsula residents credit, they insisted to be heard as a community in a question answer forum.  There had to be at least 10 Cal Trans employees and 3 Police officers at the meeting. (Who is paying for all of this?) I said they could save alot of money just lowering the speed on all of 255 to 45 MPH and painting double yellow lines the entire way. A person in the crowd asked for a show of hands for all that agreed and many hands were raised. One of the Cal Trans dudes answered, "There are legal issues to lowering the speed since the median speed on 255 is 59 MPH." Huh? That is why we were having the meeting in the first place! People are going to fast! "We have to do traffic calming measures to lower the medium speed, so we can lower the speed limit." That is just crazy talk!

On great potential project they had on one of the posters is potential extensions on the Samoa Bridge to allow foot and bike traffic on platforms hooked to the outside of the bridge. Three different concepts that looked very doable.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Caltrans can't arbitrarily set speed limits. It has to follow the law, the law created to prevent speed traps. Speed surveys have to be conducted and the limits have to be based on the average speed recorded during the survey. That is why Caltrans can't just arbitrarily lower the speed limit through Richardson Grove either.

Anonymous said...

haha, excellent! you can be a real dumbass sometimes, samoasoftball, but this is spot friggin on. "divide and conquer", no kidding. It's like when the oil refinery reps would visit our middle school every other year to answer questions and concerns from the students about their operations and why they explode all the time. Present caltrans with a no bullshit show of hands only to have them prove they aren't open to suggestions in the first place. It's all a PR dog and pony show so they can say they've "worked with the community and buzzwords input accessible cooperation community community community" yada yada yada. Shoulda grilled them about the richardson grove waste of money too. Wish I'da known about this one. Good job!

Anonymous said...

What other communities in Humboldt have a 55 mph highway running through them?
I support a 45 mph Manila zone.

Anonymous said...

They could resolve the speed issues in Samoa by restoring the 65 mph limit on 101 between Arcata and Eureka. The road is statistically very safe -- the "blood alley" moniker was the invention of a newspaper editor. Look at the history of the road (and other roads) and you'll see 101 is better than most, even at 65 mph. We drive through Samoa because it's faster.

Anonymous said...

I hope they don't lower the speed limit. I have never once seen a problem in my decades of driving that road. What I do see are a lot of homes that need to clean up their yards and take pride in their community. I suspect this is a handfull of of those losers who would rather slow everyone down around them than take responsibility for their own patch of Earth.

Anonymous said...

Arcata's "improvement" project on Samoa Blvd. will put an end to people trying to save time by driving through Manila.

Anonymous said...

To answer anon 9:01..
The avenue of the giants is 55mph and goes through many communities

Anonymous said...

Anonymous @ 10:12: "We drive through Samoa because it's faster."
What does that save you? 30 seconds? Come on, slow down.

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