My Position on Traffic Management

By Barbara Denny

The people decisively defeated the Coronado tunnel project in June 2010. Coronado needs realistic and cost effective traffic management in order to improve our island quality of life and property values. The time for traffic "study" is over. Now is the time for positive action. City council must roll up our collective sleeves and do the hard work of (1) agreeing to a traffic policy that reduces vehicle trips to/from our island and (2) directing city staff to carry out a new traffic policy.

Now that the tunnel project is virtually over, there exists the possibility for real traffic relief. City council must roll up our sleeves and work hard to manage traffic in realistic and cost-effective ways. We must set goals and deliver traffic relief that reflects clearly articulated community priorities in the immediate-, short-, medium-, and long-term. Here community working group(s) are important. However, it's crucial to respect and listen to their ideas, instead of ignoring them as councilmembers have done in the past with some committees and commissions.

As I've consistently and publicly stated and wrote since I first ran for office in summer 2008, council should:

(1) Make the policy decision to put our resources toward increasing ridership on the Big Six, which are these mechanisms in our transportation infrastructure:

• Commuter Ferry
• Slugging (Casual Carpooling)
• Park & Ride
• Mass Transit Buses
• Navy Vanpools
• MTS-Navy Express Bus Program.

Increased ridership on the Big Six will improve our quality of life and property values, as well as help reduce our per capita greenhouse gas emissions 7% by 2020 and 13% by 2035. This is the legal mandate from the California Air Resources Board.

(2) Direct staff to:

(a) Work with local employers to incentivize employees to travel on the Big Six. If 1,000 workers take each of the Big Six, then we eliminate 2.88 million annual vehicle roundtrips to Coronado. Keep working toward incremental increases in Big Six ridership beyond the 1,000 mark to keep eliminating vehicle roundtrips to our island.

(b) Start with our two transportation clusters + tourism and military. After our hotels and the Navy, staff should help facilitate all other Coronado employers to incentivize workers to travel on the Big Six. While the Big Six isn't right for everyone, there are workers who can and will respond to incentives to jettison their car and reduce their personal commuting expenses.

(c) Support Navy efforts in ferry and carpooling. According to the Navy Community Plans Liaison who attended my monthly SPEAK OUT CORONADO community meeting on 28 September 2010, the Navy commuter working group is looking into three possible ferry stop(s) and carpooling for North Island and the Amphibious Base.

(d) Continue my lobbying efforts + which I began when I was sworn into office in June 2009 + with executives and planners at Caltrans, Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), the US Navy, and many elected officials over the bridge. They are agreeable to dedicating resources to the Big Six as a way to help their constituents. Those leaders that could take the extra step signed on to my letter to SANDAG, for inclusion in our Regional Transportation Plan, requesting that regional resources be spent on the Big Six in Coronado.

As I've consistently and publicly stated and wrote since I first ran for office in summer 2008:

(a) We should spend the majority of our city transportation resources on significantly increasing Big Six ridership because that will significantly reduce traffic congestion,

(b) Re-routing traffic through various neighborhoods is unwise and unhelpful because our goal is to reduce traffic congestion, not spread it around our island,

(c) In order to put the small toll back on the bridge, we must gain support from the eighteen other SANDAG board decision-makers.

According to Albert Einstein, we cannot solve our problems at the level of awareness that created them. Therefore, we must embrace a new paradigm and work toward moving people + not vehicles + to and around our island. If our budget allows, we should bring back the old, popular Island Jitney bus service.