Traveling in either direction on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, it’s a downhill straightaway into Inverness’s village center. Naturally, traffic has a tendency to speed up through town (especially those tourists!).
Decade after decade, it became almost a set-piece every few years for the Inverness Association to take up the anguished concerns of townsfolk, resulting in a letter being fired off to the county supervisor demanding that something be done to put the brakes on the Mario Andrettis tearing up the 25 m.p.h. speed limit.
As a result, at a mid-morning hour on a weekday, a C.H.P. cruiser would slip into town. In only a couple of hours, the Chippie would nail half a dozen speed-limit scofflaws. Unfortunately, those unfortunates would all be locals. From the west side of Tomales Bay, the lamentation could be heard: “No, no! That wasn’t what we meant. You were supposed to nab the tourists, not us.”
And so the demand that “something be done” would die down for a couple of years, while, of course, the tourists continued to blow through town at breakneck speeds.
Occasionally, someone would suggest a different approach. In 1972, Jean Ritter proposed what she called a “mall,” a dramatic traffic-calming reconfiguration of the boulevard, partnered with a village-owned “promenade” on what was known then as George Ludy’s lot, the parcel immediately adjacent to the Inverness Store’s parking lot. The Ritters were the proprietors of the Inverness Coffee Shop, located at the other end of downtown at the corner of Inverness Way North in what had been a gas station.
Jean’s idea was to install a foot-wide, tightly zigzagged median down the center of the roadway coupled with bulb-out “parklets” along the sides to channel the traffic lanes into a series of turns so sharp that vehicle speed would of necessity be reduced to a processional 15 m.p.h. The motorist would be confronted with four “zigs” and three “zags” to get through town. Each of the six parklets, three on each side of the roadway, would be landscaped with trees and benches. Her sketch shows no accommodation for parking—“not necessarily a disadvantage,” she opined.
She tapped the Inverness Garden Club for maintenance of the landscaping in the parklets, and she assigned responsibility for landscaping and maintenance of the bayside promenade to “the people” of Inverness. She also favored for the promenade a “magnificent sculptured donation by, for instance, J.B. Blunk!” (her exclamation point).
I don’t know how Jean’s proposal fared at the Inverness Improvement Association, as today’s Inverness Association was known then, but, obviously, Jean’s “mall” was never built. Ludy’s lot eventually became the property of the Inverness Association and was rechristened Martinelli Park. In addition to providing a landing spot for medivac helicopters, the park today features a weather-worn bench sculpture (but not by J.B. Blunk) that’s dedicated to the memory of Kay Holbrook, one of the community’s most influential grandes dames.
Thirty years passed before another attempt was launched to tame Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, 30 years during which the pattern of I.A.-letter-to-supervisor, appearance-of-C.H.P.-officer, tickets-issued-to-locals repeated itself with fiendish regularity.
Things changed in 2002. The recipient of yet another grumbling letter from the I.A. was Supervisor Steve Kinsey, who decided on a different approach. Instead of dialing the C.H.P. office in Corte Madera, Kinsey collared Farhad Mansourian of the county’s Department of Public Works and suggested sending out the department’s traffic engineer.
On Nov. 7, an eager and personable young traffic engineer named Jason Nutt (today the assistant city manager for the City of Santa Rosa) met at the Inverness firehouse with 14 community members. A laundry list of traffic complaints, as well as possible solutions, were explored. We learned that the state prohibits speed bumps on arterial roadways such as Sir Francis Drake. A stop sign on the highway was also scratched because the state does not permit a stop sign solely for purposes of speed control. Jason also pointed out that requiring every vehicle to come to a full stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has air and noise pollution drawbacks.
Out of 12 suggestions on the locals’ agenda, Jason agreed to look into eight. He also suggested we consider the merits of a traffic divider through town, because, he said, studies demonstrate that a divider typically slows traffic by 7 m.p.h. He showed us how volunteers can conduct traffic surveys without sophisticated equipment. More importantly, he committed the county to conducting a series of formal traffic speed surveys.
By the spring of 2003, data from the traffic surveys was rolling in, and we discovered that the so-called “critical speed” midday through downtown Inverness had been officially pegged at an alarming 38 m.p.h.! With this revelation, the idea for a divider climbed to the top of the list of possible solutions.
I’ll continue this story in my next column, in about a month. We’ll see how the Inverness median may be the most unique arterial median in all of California, how it attracted the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle’s architecture columnist, how the community figured out how to pay for the median, and how 683 citizens participated in the decision to make the median a reality.
Wade Holland served as county relations chair for the Inverness Association at the time of the median project.