The intersection of California Boulevard and Taft Street has seen its fair share of traffic congestion and accidents. During a weekday with Cal Poly in session, drivers can be seen scrambling to make turns with heavy oncoming traffic.
“Sometimes you wait, like, 15 minutes just to go turn left or turn right. It's just really bad," San Luis Obispo resident David Warren said. Warren frequents the Cosmic Heroes Game store off of Taft Street and has a front row view to the cars whizzing by.
“Like it becomes that friction and it becomes more of a hassle," another local resident Nathaniel Donato-Belcher added.
According to the city, over the past ten years there have been 34 crashes at this intersection with 18 injuries, two of them severe.
Plans for a roundabout have been in the works since 2017, but in order to execute those plans, the city has been working with two property owners to purchase part of their properties to complete construction. One has agreed, the other hasn’t.
“If they block that, and as you know that’s a tight spot," a manager for the 578 California Boulevard property in question said at the city council meeting in September. "I don’t know how they are going to manage the traffic."
Kirit Patel and Gita Kirit Patel are the owners of a property that contains a small retail area with multiple businesses. A representative explained at September’s city council meeting the worries they have including a loss of business. KSBY tried to reach out to them for additional comment but was unsuccessful.
Now the city is seeking eminent domain to take over a section of that property outlined here in this overlay:
The city’s Transportation Manager Luke Schwartz told KSBY in an email that the property needed for the roundabout “encroaches into landscape area, but does not require removing any buildings or off-site parking.”
Still for Donato-Belcher, he doesn’t want to see construction in an area he feels is already cramped for local businesses.
“The construction time with a roundabout, I don't think it should be. I think it'd be easier to put a stop sign,” he said.
Alternate methods of reducing congestion and accidents in the area were taken into consideration including traffic signals and a stop sign but ultimately the city found the safest method was to install a roundabout with it providing the highest percentage of a reduction in deadly and injury crashes at 82%.
Schwartz says that while the court system can take 6 months to a year to fulfill their eminent domain request, he says they are hopeful that they can reach an agreement with the property owner. He says construction could be ready to start by next summer or fall however the final timeline is dependent on acquiring the property off of California Boulevard.
