by Marcus Leftwright

The Dragonfly Report welcomes Marcus Leftwright, a talented illustrator and writer residing in Berkeley to its staff. Marcus can be found hanging out in local coffee shops where he often warns young couples that striving for posterity is like trying to negotiate with a pile of earthworms. Let’s see what he has to say about a new traffic proposal in Berkeley.

Over the past several decades, Berkeley has tried a number of strategies to solve the problems of vehicular congestion, parking, and traffic safety. The city has tried “traffic calming” measures including traffic circles, traffic diverters at intersections, speed bumps, random curbs blocking driving lanes, and one-way streets. (One plan proposed one-way streets leading to dead ends, making them legal to enter but once entered, one could never legally leave.) None of these efforts, however, has completely solved the problem that large areas of the public right of way (ROW) are taken up with oversized metal objects speeding through the city, spewing pollution, imperiling citizens, and disturbing the peace. In addition, the devotion of such large areas of public land was unfair to those who wished safer access to the streets for bicycling, sleeping, package deliveries, protest marches, dog walking, running paths, treelined sitting areas, campgrounds, storage areas for construction materials, drag racing venues, or for use as public bathrooms. Now, in the interest of safety and fairness, the city traffic department has begun a program of turning most existing two-way streets into one-way streets directing vehicular traffic out of town and converting the remaining streets to a fairer distribution of lanes as follows:

The new proposal will divide the public right of way into several lanes so as to divide traffic by direction, speed of movement, number of users, community benefit, and general fairness. These lanes will, beginning at the building front, include a public sleeping zone, a walkway for pedestrians, a parking meter zone (still operating but now used for charging bikers and other users a parking fee for attaching their bikes, scooters, e-bikes etc. to the meters), a bicycle path in one direction, a bike lane in the opposite direction, similar pairs of lanes for skateboard users, non-motorized scooters (motorized scooters will use the pedestrian lanes), e-bikes, exotic powered vehicles such as one wheel motorized skateboards, a “Human Activity Zone” (HAZ) that will be available for a variety of uses such as camping, outdoor dining, local protest marches, or sites for vendors of handmade artifacts).

Additional separate lanes will be allocated to runners, runners with baby strollers, construction materials for use in nearby building projects, deliveries (bicycle only), pushers of grocery carts containing materials for recycling, as well as a narrow quiet zone for benches, street trees, and other greenery which will additionally provide a screen for those using these areas as public bathrooms. Near the opposite side building fronts, a second pedestrian and motorized scooter lane, a zone for signs advertising local businesses, and a small, covered runway to protect rats from being attacked by other animals will be delineated. This new proposal will provide multiple separate lanes although, to prevent the public from becoming disoriented by this new traffic scheme, one lane for moving traffic will always be excavated to accommodate an open trench protected by a scarcity of orange traffic cones so as to make the public streets feel familiar to longtime residents. Due to the limited width of the public right of way, these twenty-seven lanes will have an average width of approximately two to three feet. In response to the fear that this many lanes will result in “traffic chaos”, even with no automobile traffic at all, the street department points out that each intersection will, considering only the twenty-one lanes with moving traffic, have four hundred forty-one individual lane crossings which will slow the traffic in each direction to a manageable speed.

This change is expected to be a great improvement to the public welfare, however, not everyone is happy with this new plan. The Berkeley community includes a large number of citizens who enjoy wandering, apparently aimlessly, in and across traffic lanes where they collect spare change or shout obscenities at passing motorists. Since the proposed scheme will result in the absence of passing motorists, members of this group rightly feel discriminated against and are expected to demand another lane where they can protest this injustice without interference.

Author’s note: Since the original draft of this article, Donald Trump has proposed that, if once again elected, he will invent flying cars. Should this come to pass, no doubt all these problems could be solved by giving these devices, in the interest of public safety, to current riders of motorized scooters on the public sidewalks so as to keep these riders out of harm’s way by virtue of separating them from speeding pedestrians.

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