Sonoma County Transportation & Land Use Coalition

Sonoma Mountain Village
Preliminary Development Plan

March 2006 3rd Amendment

Go to the website of Sonoma Mountain Village for 5Mb PDF file.

Sonoma County updates its General Plan.

Although the 17 year cicada may not have a plan, the County has a General Plan, which it is updating after 17 years.  Of great interest to the SCTLC is the Circulation & Transit Element of the Plan.

There are some significant advances this time around, but we may have to wait until the cicadas emerge the next time before the far-reaching effects of global climate change and the pending decline in the world's fuel supply will be recognized and taken into account.

Click here for SCTLC's comments on the draft update. 104Kb pdf.


Santa Rosa's Railroad Square gets a plan.

The city received a $450,000 grant from MTC for a pilot study to plan for the area around the Railroad Square train station. See Attachment A (PDF file) for the SMART station locations, and Attachment B (PDF file) for the boundary of the planning area.

The plan is currently underway. It will lead to a transit supportive environment through land use intensification, improved modal
connectivity and circulation, and enhancement of the physical environment.

See the project website to learn what is going on now.

Sonoma County needs a lot more buses!

Maybe we've been giving the wrong impression.  The more we revel in the advantages of rail transit, the more we begin to hear that buses are better, and that buses should be used instead of rail.

Not "instead of".  A train is part of a better system, and so are buses — lots of them.

Join us for a discussion of how we can get a bus system that all of us will want to ride.  Download the draft white paper, "A Future for
Sonoma County Bus Services" - 46Kb PDF.


TOD: Windsor and Petaluma in the lead

Where Windsor is virtually creating a new downtown adjacent to its rail station, Petaluma is redeveloping the area between its station and its historical downtown.

Petaluma created a central area specific plan using form-based codes, and is now in the implementation stage.  It is of so much interest in planning circles that a special tour to Petaluma was organized for attendees at the annual conference of the American Planning Association, held recently in San Francisco.

But Petaluma seems stuck in a suburban mindset when it comes to parking, still unwilling to ask drivers to pay their own way.  For a report on what Petaluma could do, click here.
For a discussion of what Transit Oriented Development at Railroad Square could be like, click here.

Is it an exaggeration to say that most of our land-use and transportation problems are caused by ubiquitous free parking?

A new book says it isn't.

     

 




About SCTLC

 

Comment on the website

Transportation and Land-use
in Sonoma County

Having remained rural longer than most counties in California, Sonoma County's interesting and beautiful terrain became a magnet for immigrants fleeing from the more urban parts of California.

The conservationists who founded the Sonoma County Transportation Coalition saw that the overwhelming reliance on the automobile was eroding the countryside. Sprawl was going to kill the natural amenities that brought people here. Transportation options better suited for centers of population than for sprawl were needed.

If cities become much more pleasant places to live, people may become more content with urban surroundings and less eager to plant houses in the countryside.

On this website, we attempt to explain some of the shortcomings of the autocentric approaches that dominate our lives. At the same time we present constructive alternatives that are realistic and economic. Insofar as possible, we try to illustrate these alternatives with examples of successful approaches used elsewhere. We also call attention to Sonoma County initiatives that we think are pointed in the right directions. There are many.

Transportation | Land-use | Institutions | Campaign |

5/1/06