City of Encinitas General Plan Update: HOME

The key to bicyclist and pedestrian safety is not segregation, which is impractical, but control of vehicular speeds. We need to find ways to reduce speed limits enforceably, despite the state's efforts to prevent this with its 85th percentile speed law.

As the draft is written, it seems to consider that our near future (35 years) will include significantly enhanced bus ridership, biking and walking in preference to use of the private automobile. Thoughts of multi-modal streets, etc. are the key ingredient for responsible management of transportation in the future.

I have read much about transportation within cities and have found little to substantiate this premise. I couldn't agree more that it is wise, and even desireable, but not reality. If we want a serious document that really helps us plan the future of our city, we should be dealing with reality, not fantasy. We do have good data on traffic and circulation within the city, let's expand that to design for development in the future. We will only allow gridlock and poor circulation if we put our heads in the sand and ignore reality.

To make a blanket statement that we should allow intersections to fail and traffic to que for blocks, theoretically forcing people to flee to their bicycles is heresy. You are professional planners hopefully planning our future, and the best you can do is "let it fail?"

That is not responsibly managing our circulation.

If intersections and streets need to be widened, and private property taken, that is the price to be paid, simple as that.

The Regional Circulation Report posted in the Key Reports section has a great impact on this draft, yet this SANDAG report seems to be a document that is in process and has not been adopted as yet. This document also has a housing needs section to it. Are we basing our future housing needs on this?

I never thought that after a City Council meeting I would ever agree with David Meyers and Doug Harwood's comments, but I guess there is always a first time. The draft Circulation Element needs to be redone.

Let's see what the differences between the old Circulation Element and the new one are:

The old Circulation Element has policies in place to aim for LOS C {LOS is measured from A[good] to F[worst]} and put up with D or E if there is no other option. The current Circulation Element has a provision that shuts down development around an intersection if the LOS gets too bad. The current element also has a provision that any major change in the designation of a roadway must be voted on [Encinitas currently has four roadway designations plus a freeway designation]. There is a provision that the traffic conditions be periodically evaluated. The current plan has graphs, maps, and pictorial descriptions of each roadway designation, LOS and ADT figures for major roadways, and was done in 39 pages.

The proposed New Circulation Element accepts LOS D as a baseline and allows even worse [the City has been trying to make this change for quite some time], eliminates the vote on street designation changes, the halt of development at severely impacted intersections, and the requirement that periodic traffic evaluations to be done. The new element talks about more than four street designations, but contains no definitions, no LOS maps, no ADT maps, no current or future future traffic figures. The proposed new Element does have nice color pictures and lots of feel good verbiage. It takes 59 pages to present far less real information than the old Element.

Come back to us when you have up to date traffic data, LOS maps, ADT maps, and enough data to make some sort of projections. Come back to us when you have some other answer other than abandoning any standards so you can accomplish other goals. Come back to us when a program of regular traffic counts are done at the same intervals and time every two years. Come back to us with a plan to monitor our traffic changes by utilizing the bi-yearly counts and the traffic counts done by developers rather than using Austin-Fouts magic computer program that is based on assumptions and Caltrans projections, which we know from their own results does not work. If our Traffic manager can't contract for traffic counts and handle projections based on actual comparisons of counts, let's get someone who can.

We should be updating the vision of the of the General Plan, not throwing it under the bus.

Increased Traffic: The city is planning to convert most commercial areas along the El Camino Real to mixed residential/commercial use area. This will allow the building of over one thousand dwellings along the El Camino Real corridor. In addition, El Camino Real will be reduced from 3 to 2 lanes each way. The city admits they will have to downgrade the traffic from LOS-D to LOS-E. Planning for failure is unacceptable. They should not plan to make the already congested traffic along El Camino Real to get any worse.

El Camino Real is a major thoroughfare for commuters in and out of Encinitas. Adding wider bike lanes and wider sidewalks will do little to ease the traffic. I do not see anywhere in the plan how commuters will be discouraged to use El Camino Real to get to the freeway.

Read about the reasons why so many of us object to the proposed land re-zoning and redevelopment of El Camino Real:

visit our website at

www.NewEncinitasResidents.com.