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Wake up, Fresno, and consolidate rail lines

(Published July 28, 2001)

Like Rip Van Winkle I have returned to Fresno after a 25-year absence. It provides a unique vantage point to comment on the changes that have taken place while "asleep." I was raised in Fresno, a product of Fresno High School and Fresno State College. I was quite familiar with the Fresno of 25 to 50 years ago.

On return, one of the most striking experiences is that it takes about twice as much travel to do the same errands and trips that it used to. It seems that with its freeway development and the form of residential development, that Fresno has butchered its old street grid pattern, and built a vast array of streets without the grid pattern.

I have been amazed at how many former travel routes are dead ends, go in curvy patterns or have been eliminated completely. And I'm amazed at how many residential subdivisions are accessible only through gates.

Downtown Fresno's street pattern is total chaos compared with the way it used to be. There are eight freeway entry points and 13 undercrossings into downtown today. There used to be about 40 local street entry points. And we wonder why downtown struggles. I wonder how many Fresnans realize the price that is being paid for the way streets have been developed over the past few decades. And more ominously, portend a future of increased congestion.

I first experienced Fresno near Palm and Ashlan avenues. Daily trips typically took us through the surrounding neighborhoods. Over quite an extended area, these neighborhoods became very familiar.

Fast forward. I am now living in northwest Clovis. Trips are never through the surrounding neighborhoods. It's out to the soulless boulevards and freeways for every trip. I may never have occasion to see, much less feel familiar with the surrounding neighborhoods. No, let's call them subdivisions. The coldness of the term fits better. They are often behind concrete block walls. Granted the freeways and boulevards make the longer city trips faster, and shopping centers are bulging with a greater selection of wares, but the price for the faster cross-town trips and for having the multitude of shopping centers is much higher than we think, because so many of the little trips are not so little any more, and the sense of community is greatly diminished.

Neighborhood scourge

These blockages to the very useful grid pattern are nowhere more pronounced than the ironically old Santa Fe Railway tracks (now the BNSF). This rail corridor, even back in the '50s, was a scourge to traveling the neighborhoods. One had to travel extra blocks to get around the tracks. It is hard to believe that for all the millions that have been spent for "improved" transportation in Fresno that the Santa Fe, now BNSF, rail corridor still exists to chop up the neighborhoods. I can't imagine a better project to improve the much needed neighborliness of a large segment of Fresno than to eliminate this disfigurement of the city by the BNSF railroad.

The new suburbs have gone too far to correct the travel patterns there, but we do have an opportunity to reverse a long-term blight on a large number of Fresno neighborhoods by supporting the rail consolidation effort now being mounted by a vigorous citizens group with unprecedented support from state and federal sources. Fresnans need to seize this unique opportunity to restore a part of the vanishing neighborliness of the Fresno to which Rip Van Winkle has returned.