DOWNTOWN AT THE CROSSROADS: BALANCING CAPACITY NEEDS WITH QUALITY OF LIFE IN LAFAYETTE

The City of Lafayette, in the San Francisco East Bay area, has historically faced a challenge that is becoming more common throughout the country as downtowns grow up around busy arterial roadways. The problem is to find how to accommodate through traffic while maintaining access and interest in local businesses and community activities. Lafayette has a particular problem in that its small but growing downtown is centered around two intersecting arterials, one of which serves as a primary route to the neighboring Town of Moraga. Over the past several years, the City of Lafayette has studied several alternatives for increasing capacity through the downtown, with the process including extensive public input, commission and council deliberation, and successively more detailed traffic studies. Through this process, decision makers sought to balance a staggering array of concerns and to please a wide range of interest groups, including residents of Moraga and Lafayette, desiring speedy through travel, while residents on side streets were nervous about cut-through traffic, downtown boosters interested in maintaining on-street parking and wide sidewalks, and school representatives concerned about travel speeds. This paper will describe how the primary players in this process brought about an approved plan which will balance the needs of all users, through modest capacity/operational improvements, maintenance of on-street parking and sidewalks and cooperation with adjacent commercial property owners.