Sebastopol's Main Street Is Going Two-Way Again. This Time, the Council Decided, Not the Voters.

"I have an experience in town where I feel like I'm slowing down: I'm having eye contact; I'm seeing kids on the sidewalk; I'm seeing animals interacting with people. And there's something that happens in the heart."

That's Alice Duvernell, who owns Biophilia Botanicals on South Main Street, describing what she wants downtown Sebastopol to feel like. She said it to the city council in May, arguing that Main Street as it currently runs, one direction only, moves too fast to be safe. Six weeks later she got her wish, on paper at least. The city council voted 4 to 1 on May 19, 2026, to adopt a plan that converts Main Street, Petaluma Avenue and the stretch of McKinley Street in front of Whole Foods back to two-way traffic.

If you've lived in Sebastopol a while, this might sound familiar. It should. The city has done this exact dance before, and both times it ended at the ballot box. This time it didn't, and that difference matters more than the traffic pattern itself.

The Town Has Reversed Itself on This Before

Sebastopol's streets ran two-way for most of the twentieth century. In June 1984, voters narrowly approved a measure to switch Main Street and Petaluma Avenue to the one-way system the town still uses today, by a margin of 931 to 887. Three years later, a group of residents who wanted their two-way streets back put the question on the ballot again as Measure A. That vote went the other way hard: roughly 1,600 residents chose to keep the one-way pattern in place, and it has stood ever since.

Both of those decisions were made directly by the people who live here, at the ballot box, with a clear yes-or-no question in front of them. That's the piece worth holding onto as you read the rest of this, because 2026 didn't work that way.

A Council Vote, Not a Ballot Measure

Back in 2023, at a Chamber of Commerce mixer discussing ways to bring more activity downtown, then-Mayor Neysa Hinton pushed back on critics of the city's economic development spending. She pointed out that residents had voted to make Main Street one-way, and that anyone who wanted to undo that could take the question back to voters.

Nobody did. Instead, the city spent the next two years running a Caltrans-funded planning study called Reimagining the Core, hired traffic consultants Fehr & Peers, held community workshops at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and built out four possible street designs. The Planning Commission picked one in February 2026. The city council confirmed it in March and formally adopted it in May. At no point did the question go back to the public as a ballot measure. The people who live along Main Street and Petaluma Avenue will drive a different traffic pattern in the coming years because five elected officials decided it, not because their neighbors voted for it.

That's not unusual for a municipal streetscape project. Most cities make these calls through their councils and planning commissions rather than putting every lane configuration to a public vote. But it is a real change in how this particular decision got made in this particular town, and it's worth knowing if you're used to thinking of Sebastopol's one-way streets as something residents chose for themselves twice already.

The Number That Overrode the Survey

Here's the part that surprised a lot of people who followed the process closely. When the city surveyed residents on the four street design alternatives, the clear favorite was Alternative 3, nicknamed "Walkable One-Way." Fehr & Peers, the consultants running the study, preferred it too. It kept the existing one-way pattern but added pedestrian upgrades.

The Planning Commission didn't recommend that one. They recommended Alternative 4, "Totally Two-Way," then folded in the pedestrian and parking treatments from the one-way option the public actually wanted. Longtime Planning Commission member Paul Fritz explained the reasoning afterward: "We basically voted to approve Alternative 3, but with two-way streets. Granted, that is not an insignificant change, but I think what many people like about Alternative 3 is the improved pedestrian environment. I love that too! I just don't think the one-way system serves us well, particularly in regard to safety and placemaking."

The safety argument has real numbers behind it. A 2023 California Office of Traffic Safety study ranked Sebastopol worst among 73 similarly sized California cities for overall pedestrian safety for residents ages 15 to 65, and ninth from the bottom for overall traffic safety. Those rankings, not the survey results and not the consultants' own preference, are what the commission and later the council pointed to when they picked the more disruptive option. If you've wondered why the town seemed to override its own poll, that's the answer: the people running the process decided a safety ranking that bad outweighed what residents said they wanted on a form.

What the New Streets Are Actually Supposed to Do

The adopted design, sometimes called the hybrid alternative, tries to split Sebastopol's traffic into two jobs. Main Street becomes the small-town shopping street. Petaluma Avenue and McKinley become the route regional traffic uses to get through town.

Concretely, that means:

• Northbound traffic heading toward Santa Rosa gets routed left onto McKinley Street in front of Whole Foods, then right onto Petaluma Avenue, then left onto Bodega Avenue or Sebastopol Road heading east. Southbound traffic follows the reverse.
• Bulb-outs get added at several downtown intersections to shorten crossing distances for pedestrians.
• The Joe Rodota Trail gets extended across Petaluma Avenue to connect to Main Street near the post office.
• Bike lanes throughout the corridor get upgraded to Class IV, meaning physically separated from car traffic rather than just painted lines.
• The downtown plaza along McKinley and Petaluma Avenue gets pedestrian and gathering-space improvements.

Fritz described the goal at the meeting: "Main Street becomes much more of a small-town Main Street, and Petaluma Avenue/McKinley becomes like a through-way. I just find that super appealing. I just want to have a small-town Main Street."

Adopting the Plan Isn't the Same as Building It

If you're picturing crews repaving Main Street next spring, slow down. The $260,000 Caltrans grant that funded the entire two-year study is spent. What the council approved in May was the design itself and a set of recommended next steps, not a construction budget or a start date.

Those next steps include forming a downtown implementation advisory group to guide phasing and design refinement, and developing a public realm plan with streetscape design guidelines so the improvements read as one coordinated project rather than a patchwork. Because Main Street and Petaluma Avenue also function as State Routes 116 and 12, any physical change to lane configuration requires sign-off from Caltrans and coordination with the Sonoma County Transportation Authority. Consultant Geoff Rubendall told the council directly that delivering the project "requires involvement from Caltrans, SCTCA, other agency partners, as well as the commitment from the city and the community to move this forward." Interim Planning Director Jane Riley was equally direct with the commission earlier in the process: adopting the study doesn't commit the city to building anything.

In other words, the vote settled the argument over which design Sebastopol wants. It did not settle who pays for it or when the pavement actually changes.

Not Everyone Downtown Agrees This Solves the Right Problem

Support for the change was never unanimous, including among people who run businesses on the affected blocks. Jennifer Koelemeijer, the Planning Commission's vice chair and owner of the home goods store Gather on Main Street, backed the placemaking goals but flagged a specific worry during deliberations: the original two-way design eliminated all downtown parking on the Main Street block in favor of bike paths. "Removing all the parking on Main Street would kill the businesses," she told the commission, which is part of why the final hybrid design folded back in the parking-preserving elements from the one-way alternative.

The idea of returning to two-way streets isn't new to Sebastopol's business community either. Back in 2023, Barlow owner Barney Aldridge raised it at a Chamber of Commerce gathering focused on bringing more life to downtown, arguing alongside a push for additional hotel rooms that a two-way Main Street would help the district function better. Three years later, the city arrived at a version of that idea, though not by putting it to a public vote the way it did in 1984 and 1987.

If you drive, walk, or bike through downtown Sebastopol on a normal week, the routing you're used to isn't finished changing. It's just entered the phase where the argument moves from design meetings to funding meetings, and nobody outside city hall has set a date yet for when the paint actually moves.

If you want a clearer read on how downtown Sebastopol is changing and what it might mean for a specific block or property, Rhonda Alderman has been tracking these shifts as part of her ongoing coverage of west Sonoma County, and is glad to talk through what any of it means for your particular corner of town.