Yesterday we talked about extending Old Trabuco Rd, putting a new traffic light on Lake Forest Drive, and problems with parking in Bennett Ranch. Today we’ll continue the discussion on parking and traffic.
Parking and traffic are major concerns of our residents. I reported last week that in the city’s ALF system for the last quarter of 2016, parking and traffic combined were the most concerning issues, accounting for 20% of the inquiries. During that same period, my own set of inquiries revealed that traffic was 1 of 3 major issues (the other ones being council behavior and animals). So, any way you slice the cake, traffic and parking are major concerns.
PARKING POLICIES
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At my instigation last year we started on a comprehensive look at parking in the City. This resulted in a staff level “Parking Management Advisory Committee” who studied the issue and then worked with the Planning Commission (Oct 13, 2016) who ultimately released a “Residential Parking Manual” (Jan 12, 2017) which now comes before the Council.
Regarding our past “permit parking” process, staff “concluded that an over-reliance on permit parking may have the unintended outcome of creating more exclusive use of street parking and subsequently moving overflow parking into other neighborhoods.”
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Staff created a matrix of resident concerns (10 of them) and staff approaches (12 of them) designed to provide more efficient and effective parking management. (see page 7 of Attachment A ). This is a great first attempt to tie all the different elements together and should give us a firm foundation to move forward.
TRAFFIC COMMISSION
I have been advocating for a Traffic Commission for years. It got support from just about everyone when they were running for office, but once in office, my colleagues refused to vote for it and instead created a “Traffic Advisory Group” that was basically an extension of the city staff. They solved very few problems and endorsed pretty much everything the staff was doing. When it came time to renew the Group, even my colleagues voted to send it to an early grave.
Yet here we are more than a year later and problems with parking and traffic are as high as they’ve even been. There are several reasons for this. The main one is the never-ending building of new homes which continues unabated. The “Gang of 3” (Voigts, Robinson, and Hamilton) continue to approve each and every proposal from developers, who continue to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of these three men. We are already choking in traffic and there are thousands more homes approved that haven’t even been built yet. We have no new streets or freeways and there is nothing that can siphon off this new traffic. Even worse, our neighbor to the North, Irvine, is adding homes at an even higher pace than we are, which means the regional traffic will increase as well.
The second main reason for the traffic congestion problem is the lack of innovation by the city. Staff keeps singing the siren song of synchronization, knowing full well that traffic light synchronization does not work in areas with high cross traffic, such as El Toro Drive, or Lake Forest Drive.
A third major problem is the lack of information. We have no idea where the congestion is, what it consists of, and whether or not it’s getting better or worse. We have no idea what the traffic accident patterns are, where they are, and how they are changing, especially at the street level. The City has dozens of “traffic studies” used to justify adding more and more homes, but anyone who lives here knows that the problems are serious.
An independent traffic commission, composed of competent individuals (who are not appointed because they are campaign contributors to the Gang of 3) is needed to go through macro and micro analyses and solve the myriad problems in our City. Half of the cities in Orange County have a similar group in existence.
Such a commission needs to be an independent commission and not an add-on to a Planning Commission (Click here). There are several reasons for this –
The skills necessary to do a good job on traffic and parking are not necessarily the same as the skills needed to manage planning, and no one on the current Planning Commission appears to be skilled in the area of traffic and parking, at least if we can judge from the recent hearings on the proposed hotel in the Gateway Center.
Bringing in a new set of commissioners allows even more people to get involved in government, which is a good thing in my perceptions. People are our greatest resource, and the more people we can involve in the City the better we will be as a City.
The Planning Commission used to meet twice monthly, but they have been cut back to once per month, so adding the Traffic Commission will not add to the costs of holding meetings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.
Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be February 25 at the Lake 1 Clubhouse from 2 to 4 pm.
