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closeAfter almost seven months of a battered downtown, the work is finally finished, and it looks great. We have our streets back.
I remember not long ago that downtown businessmen were pleading with the city leaders to slow traffic in the downtown.
Well, they did a pretty good job as we motorists and pedestrians slalomed around open trenches, orange traffic cones, metal plates, heavy-duty earth-moving machines, workers and wooden barricades.
It kept us mentally alert because the “course” would change every day and sometimes several times in the same day.
But like smart little mice we navigated the roadblocks and got to wherever it was we needed to be. Some of the not-so-smart mice still drive a little too fast through the middle of the downtown.
But now we have a freshly paved main street featuring raised center medians with planted trees, shrubs and flowers just as you come into the historic downtown.
A new fence adorns the police station parking lot, replacing the ugly wound-wire fencing that has been there for almost four decades.
The job even included restriping El Camino Real from San Jacinto Avenue to Rosario Avenue and eliminating one traffic lane as you drive south into the downtown. This should help reduce the speed of traffic coming into the downtown from the north.
I am especially fond of some of the new street signs that went up at the completion of the job. There is one that proclaims the area as the “Colony District” and another pointing to the downtown in general.
Unfortunately, both new signs are located in one of the ugliest areas of the downtown (such as between the Traffic Way on and off-ramps and El Camino Real). It seems strange that the area in the biggest need of improvement got none.
This latest batch of improvements also included enhancing the entrance to the pedestrian tunnel that runs beneath the freeway, including new lighting which makes using the tunnel less foreboding. Last year, the city improved a short portion of Traffic Way that also includes a planted median.
The city spent slightly more than a million bucks to make these improvements happen. It demonstrates the City Council’s commitment to enhance the downtown area of this community, something long overdue. What doesn’t make sense, then, is why the council doesn’t take the next step and enforce its sign ordinance to control nonconforming sidewalk sandwich board signs and banners that simply trash the downtown, or give our community what one study concluded, a “garage sale mentality appearance.”
Atascadero deserves better.
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