Before the City Council votes to spend $100,000 on a traffic
study related to Welburn Avenue, it should stop and think. Spending
$100,000 just to appease unhappy neighbors is a lousy idea. What’s
$100,000 going to buy in terms of solutions? From our vantage
point, absolutely nothing.
Before the City Council votes to spend $100,000 on a traffic study related to Welburn Avenue, it should stop and think. Spending $100,000 just to appease unhappy neighbors is a lousy idea. What’s $100,000 going to buy in terms of solutions? From our vantage point, absolutely nothing.
It’s simple to figure out what’s going on with Welburn Avenue traffic. It’s a narrow street through older Gilroy neighborhoods that has become, unfortunately, a major east-west city connector. There’s a choke point from Church Street to Wren Avenue which exacerbates the situation. It’s rudimentary that the options are few – either live with it or widen it. There’s no way the city’s going to buy houses along the street to widen it, so the basic conclusion is to live with it.
There could, perhaps, be a few alternative solutions that might ease the situation, but Gilroy should not need to spend $100,000 to figure those out. The city has a traffic engineer who should be able to deliver a study of sorts to the Council with suggestions.
Closing the street off in various locations doesn’t seem realistic, but perhaps there are other funneling techniques the city’s engineer could suggest which may help.
In terms of planning, it’s clear the city didn’t do a good job in this case of taking into account long-term traffic flow, housing density and shopping patterns.
A full citywide traffic study in conjunction with a required General Plan update is not too far away. That’s a good time to spend money on a full-blown traffic study. Meanwhile, land planning that minimizes the need to drive in town should sit atop the Council’s to-do list. School traffic is one of the worst problems in Gilroy, and the easiest to point out in terms of poor traffic circulation planning. Gilroy can do better, but spending $100,000 to find out what we already know makes little sense.
