Novato’s San Marin Drive is notorious for being one of the worst roads in northern Marin County no matter how you’re traveling on it. There are no bike lanes, forcing riders to either take the lane with high speed traffic or, more likely stick to the sidewalks or other streets. The multilane, all-way stop intersections are baffling for drivers – if eight cars pull up to a stop at the same time, whose turn is it? To cross the street on foot, you have to peek around stopped cars and spend what feels like an eternity in the crosswalk.
Unfortunately, this isn’t just academic. The road has seen more than its fair share of fatal crashes over the years, the most recent of which occurred this past April. Here’s another close call (as close as it can get) at the same intersection as the fatal crash.
How You Can Help
As we describe below, Novato will have a chance to reimagine San Marin Drive, but city leaders need to hear from their constituents. Click here to register for our campaign kick-off Zoom call on Monday, August 10th at 6 PM. If you only have 30 seconds, click here to send an email to the City Council urging them to build a safer San Marin Drive. We have provided a template, but please personalize it with your experiences of San Marin Drive.
A Plan for a Pipeline
The exciting opportunity to push for a safer San Marin Drive comes from an unlikely source. Marin Water (formerly MMWD) is in the planning stages of building a pipeline connecting the North Marin Aqueduct that runs along US-101 to the Nicasio Reservoir, west of Novato. This pipeline, called the Atmospheric River Capture Project (the ARC), is intended to help Marin collect and store water from the Russian River during big rainstorms. To get between US-101 and Nicasio Reservoir, it will go right down the middle of San Marin Drive, continuing out Novato Boulevard past Stafford Lake and on to the reservoir.
What This Means for San Marin and Novato
With San Marin Drive getting dug up to install a pipeline beneath the roadway, it would be a huge shame to put this road back the way it is today. Rather, Novato has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to imagine a slower, safer, more efficient San Marin Drive for all of its current and potential users.
(It would also present a potential to improve the unrideable pathway between Dogbone Meadow and Stafford Lake, but we’ll save that for a future post.)
A Better Future if we Choose it
What would a safer San Marin Drive look like? First and foremost, the road does not need four lanes! How do we know this? Because there are only two lanes between Simmons Lane and the former Fireman’s Fund site, meaning that people are already able to get out to the highway with the existing bottleneck.
Congestion on San Marin Drive is typically due to the presence of the multilane all-way stops, which are an extremely inefficient form of traffic control. Rather than improving traffic flow, the road’s two lanes in each direction encourage impatient drivers to pass dangerously and put pedestrians walking in the unsignalized crosswalks at risk.
While analysis is no doubt needed, we believe that Novato would be well-served by reducing San Marin Drive to one lane in each direction and installing single lane roundabouts at the major intersections (Simmons, San Andreas, and Novato Blvd). The lower-volume side streets could remain stop-controlled and traffic counts would be needed to determine what to do with the intersections of San Carlos and San Ramon.
MCBC Concepts
Below is the existing cross section of the western portion of San Marin Drive. For most of its 2.7 miles between US-101 and San Marin High School, it is two lanes in each direction with a median and on-street parking. The below concepts all deal with the 1.6 mile west of Simmons Lane, where the road does not have bike lanes. Between Simmons Lane and US-101 (past Fireman’s Fund), there are already bike lanes that could easily be protected.
Alternative 1 – The Slam Dunk
The simplest and easiest change to make to San Marin Drive would be to replace the outside automotive lanes with buffered bike lanes. This would improve bike safety, reduce dangerous speeding, and still allow emergency vehicles to bypass traffic (cars would pull into the bike lane when necessary). This is exactly the configuration for Las Gallinas Avenue between Freitas Parkway and Lucas Valley Road, a street that has the same width and fronting residential uses as San Marin Drive.
Alternative 2 – The Stretch Goal
At MCBC, we always advocate first and foremost for bike infrastructure that will work for people of all ages and abilities. A painted bike lane, while an improvement, would not achieve that standard on San Marin Drive.
This is why we want to see some form of protected bike lane on San Marin. Given that the road has many driveways, a curb-running, parking protected bike lane would serve to retain much of the on-street parking while still separating bicyclists from higher-speed traffic.
On some blocks with little on-street parking demand (between Sereno Way and San Carlos Way or in front of San Marin Plaza) parking could be removed entirely and the bikeway separated with a physical barrier.
Alternative 3 – The Utopia
There is room for a two-way bikeway on both sides of the street. Just sayin’. We don’t think this is likely to fly, but it’s worth suggesting!
Alternative 4 – A mix
This is where analysis and design comes in. It might be preferable to have a parking protected bike lane in some blocks and a buffered bike lane elsewhere, depending on the constraints. We are open to ideas but remain committed to the goal of safe streets for people riding in Novato.
Intersections
As mentioned above, replacing the all-way stops with roundabouts would almost certainly improve traffic flow and safety while simplifying the question of whose turn it is. That said, the stop sign-to-roundabout conversions would not necessarily have to happen all at once. The higher volume intersections at Simmons and Novato Boulevard would no doubt be higher priority.
Next Steps
The city is kicking off a corridor study to develop recommendations for San Marin Drive. We’ll be tracking that and letting people know when and how they can engage.
In the meantime, we want to stake out a position that San Marin Drive is too dangerous to be put back as it is now. We will be telling our partners at the city as much, and we want your help in delivering that message. Sign up here to join the Safe Streets Novato mailing list, where we will publish all of our updates on this project.
If you have more questions or you want to learn how you can get involved in this effort, click here to register for our San Marin Drive Zoom meeting on Monday, August 10th at 6 PM (we’ll record it and send the link to the SSN list if you miss it). We hope to see you there! If you only have a little time, please click here to send an email to the city council (and personalize it if you can).