It was a simple strategy.
Jam up traffic on North Main Street passing through downtown Manteca.
It was supposed to be a key to making downtown a trendy retail center, a dining and entertainment hot spot, and a place where the community gathered.
The theory was people stuck momentarily in traffic would glance into store windows and soak in the ambience luring them to either take a detour or to come back another time.
The execution involved removing the ability to make right turns from de facto curbside lanes and remove on-street parking spaces and replace them with landscaped bulb-outs.
Within six months of their installation in 2006 several were removed by city crews. Two were because they blocked the ability to make right turns from the de facto curbside lanes that had previously been painted red for just that purpose. The bulb-outs has succeeded in jamming up traffic too well as they had significantly increased traffic delays on the Main Street corridor.
Even after removal of three of the bulb outs in the 100 block of North Main traffic was still in a tourniquet. And how has that benefited downtown during the past 15 years?
The 100 block some 15 years later still has a number of the same businesses flourishing — Wells Fargo Bank, Accent Carpets, a furniture store, a styling salon, and a deli — although some are under different ownership.
Likewise through the downtown core there is 20 other business still owned by the same people or being operated by different owners. Other concerns are flourishing as well although the spaces they occupied had different businesses 15 years ago.
Now waiting for promise of
synchronized traffic signals
Four months ago an all-new senior management staff also favored not making Main Street four lanes from Yosemite Avenue and Alameda Street. They want to keep traffic slow to benefit long-promised plans for a trendy downtown. They promised to return to the council “in several months” to synchronize signals in a bid to ease the traffic back up.
They have yet to present the council with a plan to do just that at traffic signals on Main Street apparently at Alameda Street, North Street, Center Street, Yosemite Avenue, and Moffat Boulevard.
The council in June also directive staff to:
*proceed with a $2.1 million citywide traffic study.
*to “park” $3.8 million set aside for Main Street upgrades in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year and not shift it to other streets.
By keeping the money put, not only would the city have money available to make other short term improvements should the traffic synchronization not be enough, but it could also go toward other traffic flow improvements on Main Street in the downtown area on Main Street or nearby streets.
There is perhaps nothing else in Manteca as vexing — or as representative of municipal failures in follow through, broken promises made to the public by councils through roll call votes, and repeatedly spending money on the same project — than the 100 block of North Main Street.
Since 1991 the block has showcased the flightiness of elected and senior management in trying to address a major concern with two conflicting constituencies — one that believes the so far elusive promise of a trendy downtown materializing trumps traffic flow and the other that doesn’t.
*Staff on three separate occasions clearly deviated from unanimous directives from elected councils in order to pursue better alternatives that have never materialized.
*There have been no less than four changes to the 100 block of Main Street from completely redoing traffic flow to significant tweaks.
Barrack Obama was still President when five individuals elected by Manteca voters to set policy gave municipal staff a clear and unanimous direction — remove the landscape bulb-outs in the 100 block of North Main Street.
Staff’s response was equally clear. The bulb-outs would be removed by city crews within several months.
Six years later not only are the bulb-outs still there but now the third council directive made since then that involves making the bulb-outs history has effectively been batted back by senior municipal management. At the same time the promised appeasement of those irked about traffic flow by at least synchronizing traffic signals that was supposed to come back for council approval to move forward hasn’t happened.
Since 1991 when downtown traffic and shopping patterns changed forever with the opening of Mission Ridge Center anchored by Walmart city hired consultants and municipal staff have pursued the belief that Main Street traffic flow is subservient to downtown interests.
That has resulted in no less than four significant makeovers of traffic movements in the 100 block of North Main since 1991.
The first was the banning of left turns from southbound Main onto eastbound Yosemite.
When they turned out to make matters work, the city then had the no left turn lane removed with two through lanes in one direction and one in the other.
When that didn’t work they restored the ability to make the left turn and switched back to the original lane configuration.
Then in the late 1990s as traffic kept getting worse, the city hired a consultant to come up with a plan for downtown as part of the Vision 2020 effort.
Vision 2020 was a holistic approach to implementing general plan goals that involved a robust 24-member citizens’ panel to develop a roadmap to what Manteca should be like in the year 2020 in terms of amenities, job opportunities, and the quality of life.
What came out of that was a downtown plan that deliberately jammed up Main Street traffic with what is in place today.
At the time in 2006 there was pushback from the council to make the entire corridor four lanes but at the last minute they stuck with the plan now in place due to concerns voiced by two businesses in the 200 block of North Main Street — a pest control firm and a martial arts studio — that the elimination of on-street parking would kill their business.
A year later both businesses where shuttered, on-street parking was still in place, and traffic backups were even more persistent.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
