A better ride into downtown Turlock could doom stately trees

The lovely canopy of a century-old sycamore on West Main Street promises a shady summer, but at its feet sit a broken sidewalk, a tipsy curb and a rising crack running across the lanes carrying cars from bustling Highway 99 to a revitalized downtown Turlock.

Which is why its days may be numbered.

Early plans for a $2 million grant to refurbish the street came down to saving the trees or on-street parking, and at a community meeting Tuesday the cars appeared to be winning.

Road crews are years away from ripping up and repaving the the West Main corridor from Tully Road to Lander Avenue, said Nathan Bray, an engineer with the city of Turlock. The city is using the unavoidable wait time for its anticipated federal grant to gather residents’ feedback on what a better West Main would look like.

Would it give up a parking lane to provide the wider landscape strips the trees need? Would it give up both parking lanes to make room for bicyclists and landscaping? Or would pavement take priority, eliminating 29 of Turlock’s longest living residents?

Thirty community members voted on the three design proposals Bray laid out: Nine said they would give up parking on one side of the street to give the stately trees needed space; six wanted a shaded walking and biking corridor with no parking; and 15 voted to keep parking as is, leaving landscape strips too narrow for the existing trees.

Repaving the street and remaking the sidewalks makes no sense if the trees, whose roots are ripping the existing pavement apart, stay in place, Bray said.

“I think it’s money thrown down the drain,” he said.

The trees would come out if the parking lanes stay, and likely would be replaced by young trees with more manageable roots – perhaps a non-fruiting variety of Chinese pistache, said City Engineer Mike Pitcock.

Parking topped a list of concerns about the tree-friendlier plans. Several attendees wondered how, without parking lanes, cars could pull over for emergency vehicles or go around disabled cars?

“How would you like for your house to have no frontage (for parking)?” demanded one Main Street dweller who did not give her name.

Osborn Elementary School parent Mary Jackson called biking down West Main to the school “dangerous, ridiculous – they’d be suicide lanes more like.”

Osborn, the most crowded school in Turlock with 1,000 students this year, sits perched at West Main and North Soderquist Road, just past the town cemetery that touches North Tully Road just before the freeway onramp.

That is the four-lane, commercial section of West Main, which will get mostly a median strip remake under the new plan. Fewer left-turn openings will make the flow smoother and safer, Bray said, and a small fence to discourage midblock crossings by pedestrians is being considered.

A traffic light is planned for West Main and West Avenue South, where the eastbound right lane abruptly turns into the side street and the now-residential road narrows to two lanes.

It was this densely populated stretch of older homes and their shade-giving neighbors that most concerned community members. The street’s asymmetrical landscaping includes 26 of the sycamores left on the north side, only three on the south.

The trees have waged a subterranean war against the aging roadway for decades, their roots stretching well under the center line, cracking the blacktop and slipping into or strangling utility pipelines. The original, narrow sidewalks ride uneasily over and between bulging tree bases.

The makeover will include a smoother ride for walkers and wheelchairs, fresh paving across the road and could, in a few years’ time, Bray said, bring a fresh green canopy of better-behaved botanical residents, waving visitors through to downtown.

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 4:35 PM with the headline "A better ride into downtown Turlock could doom stately trees."