Another thought provoking article from this blogger. I learned from the citation to the Institute for Traffic Engineers site. There is a link on that site to traffic calming measures: Web Link While the City's efforts at virtual engagement with residents is very well intended, the question could have been much better stated (i.e., more "pragmatic").

Not all Palo Alto neighborhoods presently have traffic calming measures and, thus, a question asking if your neighborhood benefits from traffic calming is lacking an important premise. So, perhaps two questions might have been more useful. For example, "if your neighborhood has traffic calming, are such measures achieving desired goals (e.g., improving safety, reducing speed, ameliorating congestion, deterring cut-through traffic, encouraging multi-modal usage, etc.)?" And, "if your neighborhood lacks appropriate traffic calming measures, what types of changes (e.g., speed bumps, traffic tables, closures, roundabouts, sharrows, pedestrian crossings, etc.) would you like to see implemented?"

The important thing to remember and most seem to forget is that the purpose of traffic engineering is to move traffic efficiently not to hinder its progress.

Lights being timed correctly is one thing that is very poor in town.

The sequences of lights on Alma are hindered by the grade crossings. How many times have I had my green to cross suddenly change to red without a car getting across because of an impending arrival of a train. Of course this has to happen to stop the cars but when the train has gone, why does the sequence still ignore the fact that traffic across the tracks have missed a turn?

Getting traffic around bottlenecks causes big problems. Alma/ECR/Sand Hill is a personal bug bear. To avoid this I use Churchill which is a bad intersection during school commute times, but there isn't a better option. Getting A/E/S sorted should be a priority.

How many cars on University and downtown are actually circling to find a parking space? Electronic signs showing how many spaces available in all garages and pay per hour machines will help those looking for all day parking. If I am going to an unfamiliar area I drive there and then look for parking. I never look on websites beforehand to look for complicated parking rules. Visitors to town will probably arrive here and get confused by our complicated system. Getting our parking situation simplified will do a lot to help traffic flow through downtown.

But getting traffic to where it needs to go instead of pretending it will go away is a fallacy that Palo Alto needs to get over.

The statement in the last paragraph of "Resident of another neighborhood in Palo Alto" (immediately above this one) is the most appropriate.
"But getting traffic to where it needs to go instead of pretending it will go away is a fallacy that Palo Alto needs to get over."
Palo Alto Council and traffic engineers (how can they consider themselves engineers? That is like the high schooler at the soda fountain being called a soft drink engineer.) think that traffic will go away if they just push everyone to take busses or ride bikes. This will not happen.
That concept is great for 20-40 year old able bodied people without small children. Yes, I have seen the kid-carrier bikes. They neglect that a large percentage of those who live in PA are less abled and need a car to go to a store, especially if they want to bring home a bottle of milk and several cans of food. It's not on!
Council has allowed developers in many neighborhoods to remove good grocery stores from some areas.
Traffic calming should result in the cars being able to transit a given distance in the same amount of time at 8-10 am and 3-7pm as at midnight. This is not possible on Arastradero especially after all the traffic calming.
What needs to happen: 1. tell crossing guards to make students wait until a small group forms and can go across all at once. Often, now, the guard ushers each student individually across a street. Teach children to cross safely. Do not just say "they're just children"; 2. make the right most lane on north bound El Camino at Page Mill Right Turn ONLY. That lane will then be able to make the right turn and not be held up by people who will go straight; 3. enforce traffic rules for all--cars, trucks, bikes, pedestrians--with officers. Don't wait for someone to be killed; 4. enforce speed rules with officers. Now people speed all the time, even on busy residential streets with many bikers and pedestrians. I've recommended to officers whom I see parked on El Camino to set up a speed patrol on streets in my neighborhood. It never happens, at least not in my neighborhood, only on Embarcadero.
How many more can you think of?
Instead of wasting city money on traffic calming, use it to upgrade utilities, remove the utility tax, pave all streets so that there are no more pot holes and rough areas. Part of the problem in the area of rough areas is due to the city not insisting that work crews that put in plates over holes do not properly smooth out the edges.

Traffic calming is a misnomer and a fantasy as well. Traffic volume is what we are dealing with. Palo Alto has a small town infrastructure. We don't have wide, multi lane boulevards and Avenues that can accommodate the kind of traffic that's moving through our arteries and city streets daily. Developers, irresponsible companies and bad politicians allowed Palo Alto to pretend it's a big city that can be the industrial and commercial center of the peninsula. The chickens have come home to roost and now we have to read about traffic calming in a traffic congested town, an entirely impossible task.

GIGO: Garbage In, Gospel Out

RE: Resident "why does the sequence still ignore the fact that traffic across the tracks have missed a turn?"

My recollection of meetings on this problem in the mid- to late-2000s is that it takes 4-6 complete cycles of the traffic light to get the intersection back to its normal efficiency after a train has passed. Because that efficiency involves synchronization of the traffic flows both parallel to the tracks and across the tracks, this is a complex problem.

From what the traffic engineers said, giving the cross-track traffic priority to clear that backup creates major problems for traffic along the tracks. A "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. The simulation software for traffic flows had long been good-enough to explore this and it was being used to determine how to time and synchronize the traffic lights, including different patterns during morning vs evening peak hours.

You obviously view this from an engineer's vantage. Properly spun, responses to almost any question can be quite useful in the political world, which is where this survey abides.

Excellent article by Douglas Moran. It makes a very important point, particularly relevant to Palo Alto, the need to evaluate and understand the effectiveness and impacts of traffic calming and control measures. In this regard "Stop" signs are discussed. This is timely. Currently the City of Palo Alto is adding "Cross traffic does not stop" signs beneath "Stop" signs in a haphazard manner all over the City.This type of sign is normally used only in special situations where it is called for, not routinely. The result of what the City is doing is to create confusion along a corridor, since some intersections which are not 4-way stops have these signs and some do not. There is no logical pattern to it, no uniformity in the treatment. It also creates additional sign clutter along streetscapes, driver distraction as well as confusion. The end result is more dangerous streets.This is part of a general failure of the City to consider or even pay attention to the specific and broader impacts of what it is doing with respect to safety and neighborhood character. A new mindset is needed in Palo Alto City government.

To expand a little on "new mindset needed":

"Haphazard" deployment leads to unpredictability. In commenting to City Hall, it is useful to use both words to mutually reinforce the other.

Historical aside: I may be partially to blame. In the 1990s, I pointed out to the Transportation Division that there were so many 4-way stops that people were routinely surprised by the ones that were only 2-way. I made the observation that where I have previous lived, stop signs came with the annotation 4-way/all-way or 2-way/cross-traffic-does-not-stop. Shortly thereafter, there was a fairly extensive deployment of these additional warnings in the portions of town that mattered (northern Palo Alto). But something seems to have happened since (and I don't know what).

Similar situation: When roads narrow from 2 lanes to one, it is also haphazard/unpredictable whether it is the right or left lane that merges into the other, and signage far enough in advance is often lacking. I have pointed this out too many times, and the response that the who-merges choice seems obvious to the responsible party--unwilling to accept that others might have different intuitions.

@Douglas Moran
I think that the very selective use of "cross traffic does not stop" signs which is typically done, is the correct use of it. Since 100% coverage of all such intersections in a neighborhood is impractical at the least, something between "selective" very limited use as called for and total coverage becomes a no man's land, a twilight zone with a distracting and confusing message to drivers as they drive through a neighborhood which
is what we are doing here.

Deployment of signs has taken on a life of its own here. There is no sense
of any downside to more signs. Sign clutter, driver distraction, driver
response, neighborhood character- these are all non-issues, non-factors in consideration of traffic safety or livability in the City's one-dimensional world. To underscore this,take a look at the huge,industrial-sized "DIP" sign which just popped up at the corner of Waverley and Santa Rita.

I don't want to take this discussion off track - however I'd like to point out that Stanford has recently constructed traffic circles on Campus Drive at the intersections of Escondido and Bowdoin (it helps to have the real estate to open up the intersections to allow for this). IMHO these traffic circles are working out very nicely.

Just checked the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicines
in Washington, D.C. findings on use of "cross traffic does not stop" signs.
They say that increasing the use of cross traffic signs may cause drivers to expect them and to assume that in their absence all traffic must stop.
Use of the signs could cause drivers to expect them at all 2-way stop-controlled situations. "Expectations based on previous experience may affect judgment", "a driver may have subconsiously concluded that
intersections will have stop control". This is especially true if the street
has a certain type of roadway situation or look, which is what we are dealing with in our neighborhoods. So there is a definite caution here associated with what the City of Palo Alto is doing in its expanded use of the signs.

The basic principle I advocated was labeling all stop signs, either with "All way stop" or "Cross traffic doesn't stop" (or variants of the two). Then if there isn't a label, drivers should recognize that they need to fall back to the other/traditional ways of dealing with such intersections, such as looking for pavement markings on the cross street, or just waiting to see if cross traffic comes to a stop. As was pointed out, having a convention that the absence of one category of label cannot be used to imply the opposite. I know of many cities which do choose to put up primarily one type, and often in response to complaints rather than some more systematic criteria.

The additional labeling on stop signs is intended to improve efficiency of the intersections, not be a substitute for good sense by drivers.