Gilroy’s growing so fast, and the need has become so complex, that the city has contracted for the first time with a company that specializes in striping streets, roundabouts, biking trails and other transportation pathways.
With more than a half-dozen newfangled roundabouts and more on the way, the city brought the Fremont-based Crisp Company on board a few months ago to deal with applying all the right lines, words and arrows on the roundabouts—and the other 264 lane-miles of roadway in Gilroy.
It’s a city whose citizens are so concerned about the rampant rate of housing growth they enacted a tough new growth control law in November, just as Crisp went to work on major traffic improvements prompted by growth.
Right now, Crisp is working for new home builders whose projects have produced miles of new streets and necessitated upgrades in vehicular and pedestrian traffic flows, but the company will soon be doing the same work for the city under a contract worth upwards of $170,000 for starters.
Right before Thanksgiving, a two-man Crisp crew painstakingly applied a broken-stripe pattern to about 5,000 linear feet of a new asphalt hiking and biking trail that parallels West Third Street, from Santa Teresa Boulevard westbound toward Gilroy Gardens Family Park on Hecker Pass Highway.
It’s a once-pastoral western entranceway to the city that many in Gilroy believe was forever ruined when the city allowed hundreds of new homes to be built in a former greenbelt between the scenic highway and the sensitive riparian Uvas Creek eco-system, which is now straddled on both sides by intense residential development.
And in the weeks before, crews put the finishing strokes on the new roundabout striping at the Santa Teresa Boulevard intersections of Third Street and Miller Avenue, enhanced traffic controls necessitated by new development and paid for by developers.
It’s not just the roundabouts and miles of streets recently built and under construction, it’s also all about the new uses of pavement striping and others markings designed to move people and vehicles efficiently and safely in an ever-growing matrix of streets and trails used by bicyclists, walkers, joggers, and motorized vehicles—including tractor trailers too long to navigate the tighter roundabouts.
“We’ve been working to get a striping contractor on board, the main reason is we don’t have the capacity or the resources to do the type of striping you’re seeing out there on the streets,” said Rick Smelser, Gilroy Public Works director and city engineer.
“These are professional stripers and they do an excellent job with very fancy equipment,” he said.
Under new state laws and what is known as the “complete streets” concept, “whenever we do any work on a street, we have to incorporate all of the modes of transportation that would be on that street, not just [vehicle] traffic; pedestrians, bicycles, ADA, anything to help move people,” Smelser said.
Along with the new approach have come new words that illustrate the expanded role of striping and other directions applied to pavement. One example is the “sharrow,” a new form of striping that indicates bicycles have as much right to the road as do motor vehicles and “calls out the need to share,” the roadway, according to Smelser.
“There definitely is a learning curve [for the public] and we are still searching for the sweet spot with striping and signage,” he said.
He noted an old adage in traffic engineering, that “you don’t want to flood the public with too much information that overwhelms drivers to the point where they freeze…you don’t want to take their concentration away from driving.”
So tweaking happens, as it has at the Third Street roundabout “to make it more apparent to drivers which is the through-lane and which is the turning lane,” Smelser said.
“The public needs to be patient,” he said, as he and his team seek out those sweet spots and continue to educate drivers about roundabouts and new pavement markings.
But if you think all that yellow, white and green on the asphalt is paint, think again; paint’s a thing of the past when it comes to a modern, cost-effective striping program, according to city officials.
“It’s thermal plastic and very specialized. We’re moving away from paint,” said David Stubchaer, senior civil engineer for capital projects.
The new coatings last as long as six years, so the city doesn’t have to restripe as often and that saves money.
In the past, striping work was included in pavement contracts, according to Stubchaer, but that practice has fallen by the wayside.
“This is the first time outside of a pavement project that we have hired just for striping,” he said of the Crisp contract. “We think it’s the most efficient way to go; we don’t have the personnel or special equipment to do this kind of work,” he said.
On the planning boards for next year there’s plenty more work for Crisp according to Stubchaer. Upcoming projects include repaving and re-striping of Auto Mall Parkway (formerly Chestnut Street) from 10th Street to Luchessa Avenue, and parts of Third Street and Welburn Avenue.
