De la Vina-Figueroa Won’t Be Safer Soon

On Tuesday afternoon during a hearing that took more than two hours, the Santa Barbara City Council was presented with a project that traffic experts from both City Hall and the federal government believe would make one of the region’s most dangerous corners safer by extending the curbs, adding crosswalks, and installing lights to the De la Vina and Figueroa intersection, where one man was killed and another 11 serious accidents occurred between 2007 and 2009. But due to the controversy surrounding such “bulb-outs” — those curb extensions throughout town that have attracted the ire of many car drivers, some bicyclists, and at least half of the city council — the council instead asked the staff to return with a menu of options for the intersection, ranging from the full project to a more basic remedy of crosswalks and lighting.

“The fact that we got a grant for this intersection shows there is a problem they feel we need to address,” explained Browning Allen, the city’s transportation manager, in describing the proposal that could be paid for with a use-it-or-lose-it $326,923 federal grant. He and the hired consultant, Greg Knudson of MNS Engineers, explained that the project would make pedestrians more visible and reduce the amount of street to cross by 30 percent. Neighbors also spoke in favor of bulb-outs, with one man calling it a “scary intersection” in the middle of “stroller, dog-walking central.”

But their advocacy ran into the anti-bulb-out politics led by the council’s pro-car pragmatist Michael Self, who played a homemade video and slide show about the anecdotal dangers that bulb-outs and other traffic calming devices pose to automobiles. “Beware of safety improvements,” she warned, with councilmembers Frank Hotchkiss (who prefers the term “bottlenecks”), Dale Francisco (who argued for a simpler and less expensive solution), and Randy Rowse (who called himself an “agnostic on bulb-outs”) seeming to agree.