At a meeting in the Community Room of Juana Briones School on June 12th, Jaime Rodriguez, Chief Transportation Officer for the City of Palo Alto, presented the latest statistics and results from the Arastradero Charleston Traffic Project. According to the Palo Alto Weekly
“One of residents’ greatest concerns, that the road changes would cause increased cut-through traffic through neighborhoods, seems in large part not to have occurred, Rodriguez said. During the morning commute, cut-through traffic numbers remained relatively steady — with the exception of along Maybell Avenue.”
In point of fact, according to the statistics presented by Mr. Rodriguez, traffic at Maybell Ave and Penã Court during the AM school peak hours increased 56% in the last 6 months (from 443 to 690 vehicles) and 69% since 2008 (before the project began). The figures for Fall 2011 agreed well with the results from the Barron Square video traffic study done at the Maybell/Thain intersection in September 2011, but did not include the 220 bicycles we counted over the same period. Traffic at Maybell Ave and Maybell Court (just beyond Juana Briones School) increased 44% since Fall 2011. It is noteworthy, and perhaps suggestive of a causal effect, that the 56% increase occurred during the same time period when the “No Right Turn on Red” sign was installed at the El Camino / Arastradero intersection. Unfortunately, no data measurements were made on Coulombe Drive itself which might have identified the ‘cut-through route’ for drivers from El Camino to Arastradero avoiding the El Camino intersection. Seems our transportation engineers never studied Chaos theory or learned that traffic, like water, seeks the path of least resistance.
A copy of the slide show presentation by Mr. Rodriguez is available here.