Goleta’s Project Disconnect

I have worked in Old Town Goleta for more than 45 years. The lack of parking in Old Town is a longtime problem that merchants have always had to deal with, but now we face a much more daunting problem caused by the City of Goleta’s poor planning. The city’s plan to narrow Hollister to one lane in each direction just to create a few new parking spaces is a wrong turn that could result in a much more dangerous situation for bikers, pedestrians, and merchants. The city insists on reminding us that it is just an “Interim Striping Project,” temporarily installed to see if it works. But this multi-million-dollar experiment will take several years. And it will be paid for by the people being used as lab rats.

The plan promised to add 14 new parking spaces and safer bike lanes on Hollister through Old Town. We have studied the plan and cannot find any additional parking spaces. We end up with the same amount.

What there will be plenty of are reverse-angled parking spaces. Imagine driving down a busy Hollister Avenue, and you see an empty parking space. You stop, but there’s another car right behind you. So how do you back into the space?

Also, what about our friend on his bicycle? He, too, must stop and wait because you are blocking the bike lane. All this while you negotiate a backward diagonal park. Now imagine you’re an 80-year-old person trying to do this.

An additional safety concern is that center lane that is “reserved for emergency vehicles and deliveries.” What if there is an ambulance trying to save a life, both lanes are bumper to bumper, and there’s a beer truck in the center lane? Well, don’t worry, it’s only “interim.”

And then there’s the whole issue of an evacuation route for natural disasters or emergencies. Are we assuming that could never happen?  That seems to be tempting fate.

If you’re thinking you could escape Old Town via Fairview Avenue, here is what that looked like during the first week of construction.

To add insult to injury, the city is about to implement this experiment while simultaneously undertaking several huge construction projects that willalso cause major traffic disruptions. So how will anyone be able to tell if the interim striping experiment is working or not when the traffic is bumper to bumper from all the construction going on?

All the “Project Connect” construction hopes to be finished by 2026. Is that when we will finally be able to see if the “Interim Striping” works or not? If this really has to be done, can’t we wait for the construction to be completed before we do this experiment?

Construction has just started on a new Hollister Avenue bridge over San Jose Creek, and the traffic jams have already begun. Next, they will build two roundabouts on Hollister, one on each side of the 217 highway, and they will soon be working on the Ekwill Street extension that features another roundabout that will dump more traffic out onto Hollister at Kellogg Avenue. What all this means is: guaranteed traffic jams through Old Town for at least the next two or three years. Old merchants will wish they only had a parking problem.

Old Town parking has been a problem for decades. A thriving commercial district and an overcrowded residential area all compete for limited parking. The future will bring much more mandated housing, so common sense says more houses will mean more people and more cars on our roads.

But the “Interim Striping Plan” goes against common sense and reduces the number of cars that can use one of Goleta’s main thoroughfares. While all those cars may not be able to drive down Hollister anymore, they won’t just evaporate. They will still have to get from Point A to Point B via the highway, Calle Real or Cathedral Oaks. Are any of these options ready for a big increase in traffic?

Do the people who live on Cathedral Oaks know what’s headed their way?

Old Town residents trying to get home will bypass the maze of construction and traffic on Hollister and work their way through these very narrow neighborhood backstreets. People who work in Old Town will eventually choose the same backstreet option, some of them frustrated and in a hurry, resulting in a very dangerous situation for Old Town residents of all ages. The Goleta City Council is willing to trade all this risk for an experiment to see what happens.

A group of concerned citizens recently walked door to door and spoke to some of the Old Town merchants to see how they felt about the “interim” plan. What they learned was that any community outreach the city may have tried to make failed miserably. The majority of Hispanic merchants had no idea about the plan. Other merchants had heard something about it but didn’t know details. All of them agreed, it was a bad idea. A petition was quickly thrown together and, in a few days, more than 50 Old Town business owners signed the petition to stop the plan to restripe Hollister. Interim or not!

Old Town is one of the last affordable places to pursue the American Dream of owning your own business. The businesses are almost all Mom-and-Pop businesses, with very few empty storefronts. The upcoming gridlock may be too much for these small businesses to survive. Many longtime customers will probably choose other options with easier access.

The Chamber of Commerce has never represented the merchants in Old Town Goleta but the Chamber loves this plan. That is a red flag for Old Town businesses. Prolonged traffic jams caused by multiple construction projects and a loss of two lanes could be the Swan Song for Old Town Goleta as we have known it for nearly a century. This could be the legacy of this city council.

Why couldn’t we just add more stoplights and more push button crosswalks to slow cars down? Why can’t the city reach out to property owners to buy or lease more public parking lots? That would be a wiser use of the millions of dollars they plan to use on the interim striping experiment.

One city councilmember bragged that Project Connect will add new 90-minute timed parking. Does he not know that most of Old Town is already posted with 60-minute parking signs? Much like the speed limit, parking violations rarely get enforced. Why not enact an actual speed and parking enforcement program on the Hollister corridor, enforcing the laws that are already in place?

That same elected official recently wrote that Hollister is full of potholes. He wanted to say that, because part of the “Interim Striping Plan” involves scraping off the existing asphalt and replacing it. We walked up and down looking for those potholes, but they were never located. In fact, Hollister is in very good condition! Why scrape off perfectly good asphalt?

Elsewhere in Goleta is a different story, like La Patera and Covington for one example. Restripe those streets for Pete’s sake!

This is how Hollister looked during the first week of Project Connect, and we still have four lanes of traffic. Can you imagine an emergency evacuation with only two lanes?

Over the decades, the City of Goleta and the Chamber of Commerce have tried to change Old Town time and time again. Over and over, the citizens and merchants have resisted and continued to thrive. Old Town is a community, full of people who love where they live. Of course there are some things that need to be improved, but this plan will create more problems than it fixes.

To quote an Independent article from June 2022, “Most of the Old Town residents who spoke thought Hollister worked fine and asked to leave it alone.” Those are the people they should be answering to.