City's New Complete Streets Policy Produces Street That Is Complete in All Ways Except Being a Functional Street

The city of Ferndale has unveiled its flagship Complete Streets project on Riverside Drive, a $8 million redesign that incorporates every element recommended by current best practices in urban design and has left every category of road user — drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit riders — completely baffled about how to navigate it. 'It's got everything,' said transportation director Paul Greenway, gesturing at the corridor with visible pride. 'Protected bike lanes, bioswales, permeable pavers, rain gardens, a transit-priority signal, bulb-outs, a shared-use path, public art installations, wayfinding signage, and tactile paving. It is, by every metric, a complete street.' Asked if people could successfully use it, Greenway paused. 'That's an ongoing calibration,' he said. The problems are comprehensive. Drivers report being unable to determine which of the corridor's seven distinct surface treatments constitutes the travel lane. Cyclists describe the bike lane as 'a labyrinth' due to its routing around bioswales, art installations, and what one rider called 'a shrub that I think used to be a rain garden but is now just a shrub in the bike lane.' Pedestrians have been observed wandering across all zones with equal frequency. 'I saw a man on a bicycle in the rain garden, a car on the sidewalk, and a pedestrian standing in the transit lane reading the wayfinding sign, which was pointing at the public art,' reported resident Diane Grade. 'The public art, for the record, is a sculpture of a compass, which somehow makes the confusion worse.' The city has hired a consultant to develop educational materials explaining how to use the street. The consultant was unable to find parking and arrived by rideshare, which dropped her off in the bioswale.