Take Back Yosemite Drive, Too
While attention of local street campaigners will soon be focused on the worthy Take Back the Boulevard campaign (Colorado Boulevard, but shouldn’t it actually be Boulevards? what about the equally important Eagle Rock Boulevard?), it would be nice if the plight of Yosemite Drive was not entirely forgotten. With elementary schools at either end, and the high school and recreation center in the middle, this is really the kids’ boulevard of Eagle Rock. It’s current configuration is absurdly car prioritized, and how many kids are driving cars (well, a few high school students, but thankfully not that many). For most of the day, it serves as a racetrack for cars cutting between Figuoroa and Eagle Rock Boulevard. At school drop off and pick up times it becomes completely jammed with cars, but woe betide any student cyclist venturing onto the roadway, as the parent drivers do some crazy manuevers. The narrow and poorly maintained sidewalks are certainly not suited for combined pedestrian/ cyclist traffic, and are pretty inadequate even for the students who do go on foot.
The campaign for Colorado Boulevard has traction because of its wide constituency: community groups like TERA, business owners, wealthy homeowners north of Colorado, even politicians. Yosemite’s, on the other hand, is formed of kids going to public school and a predominantly poor neighborhood: it’s going to be really, really hard to build up any local momentum for comprehensive change.
The best chance seems to be incremental steps. The latest city bike plan at least proposes some kind of bike path designation for the street. The section of the street between Townsend and Wiota is wider and has a center turning lane, so could be reconfigured to have proper bike lanes; the rest of the street could have the less satisfactory but still worthwhile “sharrows”. The wider section coincides with the Rockdale Elementary block, where the sidewalks are especially narrow, and about 50% blocked by the giant power poles. So the sidewalks should also be widened along this block, in addition to the bike lanes. How come the city is lowering the curbs for wheelchair access at every intersection, but not addressing a sidewalk that is impassable for a wheelchair (less than 32” wide at one point)? And why should the power poles be allowed to take up almost half of the sidewalk?
Read more about Yosemite Drive on Walk Eagle Rock
