Jessica Cejnar / Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020 @ 3:48 p.m. / Community, Local Government, Roads
County Supervisors Reject Recommended Removal of Glenn Street, Cooper Avenue 4-way Stop
Del Norte County supervisors rejected a staff recommendation to change a four-way stop at Cooper Avenue and Glenn Street, saying it has succeeded in reducing collisions at that intersection.
Staff argued the streets, particularly Glenn, didn’t have the traffic volume nor the collision data to support a multi-way stop, Assistant Engineer Rosanna Bower told supervisors on Tuesday. Bower recommended removing the stop signs on Cooper Avenue and keeping the ones on Glenn Street.
“There were three collisions at that intersection in a 5-year period,” she said, citing data from 2009 when signs were installed. “The (current) threshold for a stop control is five collisions in a 12-month period. As best we can tell, based on current standards, it doesn’t meet the data that was used at the time and wouldn’t warrant it at this time.”
Del Norte County District 1 Supervisor Roger Gitlin made a motion to approve removing the stop signs on Cooper Avenue and keep the ones on Glenn Street. It died for lack of a second.
Bower said the issue came to staff’s attention after a former county engineer received a traffic ticket at that intersection and asked about it. She also argued that people will speed between stop signs, saying the more that are installed the worse their behavior becomes.
“You also have the engine noise and emissions and all that sort of thing,” she said. “But people do speed (and) accelerate faster when there’s an unnecessary stop.”
Glenn Street parallels Inyo and El Dorado streets just outside Crescent City limits and connects Del Norte High School and the local College of the Redwoods campus in the north with Pacific Avenue in the south.
Castle Rock Charter School and Bess Maxwell Elementary School are also on or near Glenn Street.
According to Bowers’ staff report, since the county Road Division is paving a section of Cooper Avenue, including the Glenn Street intersection, it’d be a good time to “adjust signage and striping configurations.”
Staff also performed an engineering study using guidance from the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and used collision data from the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System and the county’s own records.
There have been no collisions at Cooper Avenue and Glenn Street in the last five years, according to the county staff report. The speed limit on Cooper Avenue is 30 mph.
Board Chair Gerry Hemmingsen said that since the signs have eliminated “virtually all accidents” he couldn’t support county staff’s recommendation. He noted that the Board of Supervisors in 2001 “must have had a reason” for putting in the 4-way stop signs and he was reluctant to remove something that appears to have succeeded.
His colleague, District 2 Supervisor Lori Cowan agreed, saying because there are a lot of families living in the area, she would support installing more stop signs.
“We don’t have a lot of people here, but that doesn’t mean that our streets, especially back there, should be without stop signs,” she said, adding that students also walk home from school on Glenn Street. “I wish we would look at thresholds and make them more designed to our area, not as California as a whole or wherever they come from. I think we need more stop signs in that area. I certainly would not be in support of removing any.”
District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard rejected Bowers’ statement that more stop signs lead to an increase in speeding, arguing that people would speed down Cooper Avenue a lot.
“I’m scratching my head as to why time was spent on this and when there’s not a lot of time to spend,” Howard said.
In other matters on Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance that cleans up the county code. According to Del Norte County Counsel Joel Campbell Blair, an ordinance approved in May enabling local law enforcement to tow a vehicle left on a public street for more than 72 consecutive hours had been mis-numbered and couldn’t be posted on the county’s website.
“It’s kind of problematic to enforce an ordinance that you can’t point to in the county code,” he said. “That’s why it hadn’t been enforced.”
The parking ordinance will take effect by the end of September, Campbell-Blair said.
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