What if there was a way peer into a parallel universe and see what your city would look like if it was built under different economic and technological conditions? Well, it just so happens that for Santa Rosa, that opportunity largely exists in the form of Prato, Italy.
Prato and Santa Rosa are freakishly similar places in many ways. Downtown Santa Rosa is 218 acres; Downtown Prato is 229 acres. Santa Rosa's population is 176k; Prato's is 198k. It rains 32 inches annually in Santa Rosa; 36 inches in Prato. Prato is blessed with 272 days of sunshine a year; Santa Rosa 256 days. The average summer high and winter lows in both cities are nearly identical. Both cities are in productive wine growing regions. Both cities are served by a single passenger rail line and their downtowns are cut through by a single waterway--the Santa Rosa Creek and Bisenzio River. Prato sits at the western feet of the Appenine Mountains; Santa Rosa the Mayacamas Mountains. The cities even share a cultural heritage: Santa Rosa's early Italian immigrants largely came from the Tuscan region surrounding Prato. You'd be hard pressed to find two cities more similar, despite being so far away, anywhere on earth.
Yet both cities look and feel strikingly different. Prato is a charming old world city with winding cobblestone streets, the kind of place people hang paintings of above their sofas. Santa Rosa, on the other hand, is a typical North American city with a somewhat charming-yet somewhat beleaguered downtown gutted by parking lots and torn in half by a highway.
Car dependency is probably the single biggest difference between the two cities. Whereas 25 percent of the surface area of downtown Santa Rosa is dedicated to parking, that figure is less than four percent in Prato. Streets comprise 17 percent of downtown Santa Rosa versus 11 percent in Prato. Downtown Santa Rosa is cut in half by a freeway, which comprises about 5 percent of the land in downtown, while Prato's freeway skirts the edge of the city and avoids downtown entirely.
The result is two strikingly different urban experiences. For example, if you're taking a trip somewhere within Santa Rosa, driving is almost always the most convenient way to get there. Santa Rosa's roads are wide and parking is plentiful--a city analysis found that about 75% of downtown parking goes unused even on busy days. However, because cars take up so much space, accommodating them undermines the viability of all other alternatives. All those giant roads and parking lots create swaths of dead space between destinations that are typically unsafe and unpleasant to traverse by foot or bike. Just ask yourself if you, or your child, would feel safe biking down College Avenue or Santa Rosa Avenue. No surprise, about 87 percent of all trips are taken by car (even though 25% of all trips are less than 2 miles!) vs. just 60 percent of all trips in Italy (I couldn't find specific statistics for Prato but it's land use is typical of Italian cities so it's likely similar).
What's also notable about Prato, and Italy in general, is that they're able to provide an environment where attractive urbanism and competitive transit options coexist with high rates of car ownership and a rich car culture. In fact, Italian households are slightly more likely to own cars than American households, and domestic car makers like Alpha Romero, Ferrari, Fiat, Lamborghini are sources of national pride. For a city like Santa Rosa, with its car shows and cruise nights, this is important.
Prato illustrates how meeting Santa Rosa's climate, transit, density, and walkability goals--which all involve some restrictions on cars--can also lead to a more charming and pleasant place for residents and tourists without diminishing the best parts of American car culture. Given all these similarities and differences, Santa Rosa should consider forming a Sister City partnership with Prato, which is just a fun way for two jurisdictions to formally establish joint cultural, economic, and educational ties. Santa Rosa already has one sister city in Jeju, South Korea, but there's no reason it can't add another!