Change does not come easily to Inverness. We were fiercely divided back in the day, when the county started paving our residential roads. The “leave everything alone” stalwarts were even more vociferous when the county compounded the paving affront by posting street signs. “If you don’t already know where you’re going, do you really need to be here?” seemed to be the prevailing harrumph.

I recall the consternation when the county told us to chuck our house names and adopt their new-fangled numbering system. Given the slipshod job the county did in assigning numbers, the naysayers had a good point. To this day, there are Inverness properties with street addresses on nonexistent roads. On my own street, one house on the even-numbered side has an odd-numbered street address. I’m the last house on Callendar Way, but below me are houses with higher numbers. Go figure. 

And did I mention the spelling of my street name? Callendar Way sports only two street signs, one at the road’s origin beside the Inverness Lodge and the other at its indeterminately located terminus near where Dundee Way tees in. When I moved here, one of those signs spelled the name “Callendar” and the other spelled it “Callender.” Even today, county databases are inconsistent.

One issue over which the town has been forever united is the scourge of traffic speeding through the village center on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, a topic I introduced in my column in the April 6 issue. Picking up where we left off, 2002 was the year when a different approach to the problem was launched. Instead of turning to the C.H.P. to hand out speeding tickets, most of which ended up in the resentful hands of locals, Supervisor Steve Kinsey dispatched the county’s traffic engineer to meet with locals for a brainstorming session.

An early result of this collaboration was a series of speed surveys. These revealed that the midday critical speed was way up there, at 38 m.p.h. “Aha,” cried the townsfolk in righteous vindication, “We knew it!” Thus was born the possibility of installing a median, or traffic divider, down the middle of the roadway, because we were told that a median typically slows traffic by 7 m.p.h.

The Inverness Association took on the project cautiously, soliciting community input that flowed in over the next few months. By early 2003, a consensus had emerged to begin with a temporary “experimental” median delineated by asphalt curbing laid down on the existing road pavement. The public works department installed the test median in May 2003. It was 110 feet long and 6 feet wide, with a break for the crosswalk between the post office building and the Inverness Store. To accommodate the median’s width, the existing extra-wide parking lanes were narrowed to more-standard dimensions: 10 feet on the store side and 11 feet on the post office side. The driving lanes were actually widened, from 10.5 feet to 11 feet.

The median quickly attracted outside attention. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll mentioned it on August 5, 2003, writing about a week he spent in Inverness: “Very excited about new median strip down in town. Safety for pedestrians. I must congratulate someone. Do I know anyone?”

The county’s engineers measured the test median’s impact for the rest of 2003. The results from formal speed surveys astounded the traffic professionals, whose key metric is the “critical speed,” the speed below which 85 percent of the traffic is moving. The surveys showed that the pre-median critical speed of 38 m.p.h. had plummeted to a stately 23 m.p.h., while average speed had fallen from 34 m.p.h. to 21 m.p.h.

Perhaps more interesting sociologically were the surveys conducted by local volunteers who recorded traffic behavior during 30-minute intervals at different times of day and days of the week. They kept counts of through-traffic vehicles and noted whether brake lights came on as each vehicle approached the median and whether the vehicle was speeding (a subjective assessment).

They found that three-quarters of the cars slowed down coming into town. However, 90 percent of northbound vehicles slowed, while only 60 percent of southbound vehicles did so. Vehicles went through town faster when there were few or no cars parked along the sides. No northbound motor vehicles were judged to be speeding, while a total of two southbound motor vehicles were thought to be exceeding the speed limit. Note how I specified “motor vehicles” in the preceding sentence, because the tallies did not include the principal speeding culprits: bicyclists! It turned out the species Spandexus wearus notorius was most oblivious to the median’s intended purpose of slowing down wheeled traffic.

Not a single vehicle was observed blowing the crosswalk while it was occupied or when someone was waiting at the side to use it. In the “What else is new?” department, the monitors included this statement in their written report: “People were observed doing some amazingly stupid things.”

We’re going to have to wait until my next column, in about a month, to learn how the town made a collective decision to convert the test median into today’s landscaped and beautifully maintained (by volunteers, of course) permanent median. 

For better or worse, Wade Holland had his fingerprints all over the Inverness median project.