This year’s Pacific Beach traffic study gathered a considerably larger scope of information than previous years, largely credited to the implementation of new traffic sensors.
It showed that travel patterns have remained consistent with the past decade. During the survey, conducted in August, two-thirds of all traffic (64%) is vehicular, while walking accounted for almost one-third (30%) and bicycling represented another 5%. There is also more active travel (i.e. walking and biking) closer to the beach.
“Despite the presence of bike lanes, sidewalk riding remains common, suggesting that traffic stress and perceived safety have a strong influence on route choice,” according to the recently published report.
Since 2015, the grassroots nonprofit beautifulPB has conducted an annual traffic count to gather mobility data in the community. Dubbed “PB Counts,” the data is published by beautifulPB on its website to bolster the group’s advocacy.
“PB Counts was born out of a need to understand what is actually going on in the community,” said beautifulPB President Ryan Stock. “The overall prerogative of PB Counts is to have some data to match some of the anecdotes that people are bringing to the conversation when we’re talking about transportation.”
Katie Matchett, a beautifulPB board member and principal author of this year’s report, has been involved with the survey every year since its inception.
“There’s not a lot of good data sources for tracking pedestrian and bicycle movement, it’s not collected very regularly,” Matchett said. “We wanted to do a consistent count. Now that we’ve been doing it for so long, we can look for patterns and see changes over the years across all the different travel modes.”
Traditionally, the count mainly consisted of a manual traffic survey performed by volunteers. This year beautifulPB also implemented speed guns to gather data, and installed traffic sensors to monitor traffic patterns continuously.
“That gives us a much better picture in terms of patterns over the time of day, days of the week, it breaks down each individual mode (of transportation),” Matchett said. “We don’t have people out counting at midnight, but we do have the sensors up and we can see what’s happening.”
The traffic sensors were acquired with funds available through the Neighborhood Reinvestment Grant with the County of San Diego. Stock said that with the “modest” amount awarded through the grant, the results of this year’s traffic study magnified the quality of data tenfold.
Determining the locations to install these sensors came as something of a challenge, given that the city was reluctant to mount anything on its existing infrastructure.
“We approached the city early on, the response we got back was that the city is very wary about putting anything on their infrastructure,” Stock said. “I think it has something to do with the level of funding they’re feeling and not wanting to increase any amount of liability exposure.”
The other limitation was finding segments of the roadway that allowed the sensors to be positioned for optimal data gathering and had a power source.
“Finding private locations where we could make those things happen narrowed it down pretty quickly,” Matchett said. “Fortunately, the locations we ended up with are locations that are part of our advocacy work already.”
The sensors were installed at Pacific Beach Drive in June, Ocean Boulevard later that same month and at Ingraham Street in August.
“All three of those locations from a mobility perspective are super different,” Matchett said. “It gives us a nice snapshot of the different ways the roads get used in Pacific Beach.”
These sensors track and catalogue a number of data points in traffic, such as the different modes of travel like driving, bicycling or walking; the speed of these different modes and travel paths. One of the more important data sets that these sensors collect is “near miss” data, which tracks instances where vehicles come close to colliding with pedestrians and cyclists.
A volunteer monitoring traffic during beautifulPB’s manual count in August. (Chris Olson)
“Enough of those near misses one day is not going to be a miss, it’s going to be a crash,” Matchett said.
Crash data already exists and has been available, but Matchett said the near miss data provided by the sensors adds an extra dimension of the circumstances that might precipitate a collision.
“There are a lot of conflicts between cars and kids that don’t show up in police reports because no one was hit yet, and it doesn’t necessarily show that it was an accident waiting to happen, but it shows where there is a lot of conflict between cars and vulnerable road users,” Stock said.
With the sensors cataloguing pedestrian traffic, the data provides yet another dimension to understanding mobility patterns along the coast.
“I was blown away by the number of people walking on Ocean Boulevard, especially during the weekends,” Stock said. “The volume of traffic on Ocean Boulevard where the boardwalk pushes back there is relatively narrow compared to the rest of the area, but we see that at certain volumes, people just spill over into the roadway there, to the extent that it’s a five to one pedestrian to cars in the center of the roadway.”
Matchett said beautifulPB had already been advocating to close Ocean Boulevard to vehicles during peak pedestrian hours, but that the newly-collected data on near misses and pedestrian trends adds new weight to their advocacy.
“We can use data to shift the conversation from traffic flow, which is what traffic engineers are traditionally oriented to maximize, to human safety,” Stock said. “Something that is showing the number of vehicles exceeding certain speed limits, we can say ‘we see that this is unsafe’ and produce that story of urgency that there is a liability here and we know that that is a potential risk.”
Matchett echoed his sentiment, adding that “having data behind your advocacy can really get the city to take you more seriously. We know the city cares about it, but it’s just helpful to have hard numbers. Now we have some hard data to tell the story of what’s actually happening along the problematic roadways.”
This year’s PB Counts report, published at beautifulpb.com, calls for a number of recommendations based on this year’s new data, as well as the data collected over the past 11 years. Some recommendations include new bike lanes, reduced speed limits per Assembly Bill 43, radar feedback signs and closing Ocean Boulevard to vehicle traffic between Grand and Thomas avenues during peak hours of pedestrian and bicycle traffic on weekends and holidays.
Stock said the data also demonstrates that signage alone is not sufficient to combat trends of speeding at problematic roadways, and that infrastructure and street design will be more effective methods.
“There’s a lot of options you can go with,” Stock said. “You can go the arts and beautification method with greenery, through roundabouts, there could be a street sign for PB, it could be the material of the ground like moving to bricks or cobblestone at the very end of Garnet, it could be curb bulbouts.”
Stock said the group is aiming to share its report with City Council President Joe LaCava, who represents PB, and suggests that the success of the PB Counts could spark similar studies in other neighborhoods.
“I want to share this as widely as we can, with our City Council rep, with the county, with the city, to help them understand the data that is left uncollected in so many places which will lead to more efficient choices for them and ultimately safer spaces for everyone,” Stock said.
For now, the sensors will remain in place to gather even more data beyond this year’s report.
Matchett said the group is considering relocating the sensors once enough data has been collected at their current locations.
“I think we want a few more months of data before we move them,” Matchett said. “PB is so seasonal, it’s good to get a picture of summer travel and winter travel.”