Helen Putnam Park via B Street from downtown Petaluma

From downtown Petaluma, you can walk straight up B Street all the way to the dead end at Windsor Drive. Take a right and head up to the next left at Oxford Court. That is the east side entrance into Helen Putnam Park.

Crowded at noon on a Saturday. Social distancing did not look do-able. We bailed out to up and over the water tanks hill. Back around again to downtown.

Gorgeous walk. Spectacular day.

Time to stop and listen

Huge opportunity right now for most of us to take some time, get quiet, stop, listen and slow down.

Get out and go for a walk

The shelter in place quarantine order has been active for 13 hours. Thought I'd take a good walk across town to take a look at what is happening. Seems like most everything is open.

If you are planning on hunkering down at home for the next few weeks, make sure that you get out and get some exercise everyday.

Last week’s Argus Courier editorial was a huge promotion for “compromise” in the land use planning process. The editorial dismissed the “ideological purists” pushing to reduce the number of new car trips that keep getting added to our streets. But there are plenty of other cities that have already done much to reduce the growth of new car traffic.

The editorial might have us believe that it is the job of our City Council to rubber stamp whatever a developer happens to walk in the door with. If said project makes Petaluma’s traffic worse, the neighborhood less walkable and wastes the full opportunity presented by a new train station, then “That’s just business,” says the editorial.

But the lies of “compromise” are that we need to desperately choose between: getting a train station built, enticing developers to make money, creating a walkable neighborhood, or minimizing new car trips. We can have all four things. Scarcity mindset doesn’t result in a good deal. Don’t “compromise” our future vision for the next generation to just frantically get things done. Stop letting SMART and developers bully us.

Some say that we need more housing in Petaluma. But more accurately, just like the preceding 150 years, Petaluma is going to get more growth whether we think that we need it or not. Continuing to grow is already baked into our cake. There are only two ways to proceed from here: smart growth or dumb growth.

If we keep building new single-family houses with two car garages, walking distance to nowhere, then those new households will begin taking new car trips around town. Can we agree that building new housing that mindlessly increases new car use in Petaluma is dumb growth?

Can we agree that building new housing that encourages new people to not use a car for every trip is smart growth? Anyone disagree that car traffic is already getting excessive? How much more car traffic do we want? Instead of promoting high density housing for the Corona train station, our City Council desperately downzoned the property to single family use simply because the developer asked for it.

But mixed-use projects help reduce car trips and trip lengths because of the convenience of walking, bicycling, or using transit between project destinations (City’s VMT white paper). Design neighborhoods so that people can walk to buy a quart of milk or walk to the coffee shop; that’s a basic tenet of smart growth. How hard would it be to include a “mixed use” coffee shop and small corner grocery store at the new Corona Train Station? Instead, the developer was encouraged to ignore all public comment for 13 months. Previously, all public comment was deleted from the Corona Station Master Plan in 2012. Now we frantically need to make a deal to get the train station done?

We are so accustomed to driving our cars everywhere for everything. The idea that the east side train station should become a Petaluma destination and not just a parking lot point of departure is too much “ideologically pure” vision? Is it better to let the developer build whatever “makes the most economic sense” to himself than require smart growth for the future? An automobile dependent train station with auto dependent housing compromise? Are we desperate?

I disagree. Some cities bigger than ours are also much more walkable! More housing growth is coming. More cars are coming to Petaluma. How will we continue to grow ourselves in a manner that positively impacts: housing, transportation, city finances and environmental sustainability? What do we want Petaluma to look like and how will it function in the year 2040? What is the plan?

Often times developers are the land owners. But the vision, plan and rules for development is our job to articulate and enforce as a community. It’s fine for the developer to make some good money but what is the impact on all of us who already live here? What is the positive future vision that we are building towards? Hold steady, we can have it all.

We tend to let the developers guide our growth with incremental more of the same even as traffic grows extreme. The “compromise” the AC applauded let the developer dictate exactly what the future Corona Train Station should look like, for his own benefit. Any train station on the east side is better than none. But why not build a great one and get as many people to walk to it as possible? Why not?