Two marked crossings serve Kenwood’s central park. Neither lines up with the street most walkers come from — or with the park’s own paths.
Kenwood Plaza Park is the town’s green — the day-use lawn, the picnic tables, the community church at its northeast corner across Channing Row. For the houses northwest of Warm Springs Road, along Los Guilicos Avenue, a trip to the park means crossing Warm Springs, a two-lane through road.
The county has marked two crosswalks. Neither goes where the walking happens. The northeastern one, opposite Channing Row, delivers pedestrians to the foot of a private driveway at 202 Warm Springs Road — a pedestrian-crossing sign stands over somebody’s parking apron. The southwestern one sits down by Park Row, at the park’s other corner.
Between them, mid-block, is the crossing the street grid was begging for. Los Guilicos Avenue — the spine of the neighborhood — meets Warm Springs directly opposite the park’s day-use entrance. Stand at the stop sign at the end of Los Guilicos and the park gate is straight ahead of you; the park’s own path lines up with the avenue. There is no marked crossing there.
The result is a geometry problem with a predictable outcome, and the neighborhood’s children are the ones left to solve it. A kid heading for the playground can detour one way to cross into a driveway, detour the other to Park Row, or do what desire lines have always made people do: cross unmarked, mid-block, exactly where drivers have the least reason to expect them. Paint that ignores where people walk does not change where people walk. It just leaves the walkers outside the markings.
The fix is modest by roadwork standards — striping, a sign, and a ramp at the bollard line, not a capital project. Warm Springs Road is county-maintained, so the paint belongs to Sonoma County Public Infrastructure, and the venue for getting it onto the county’s list is the North Sonoma Valley Municipal Advisory Council, which next meets September 15. And the timing makes the question sharper, not idler: county crews were at this corner within the past two years. The Board-approved 2024–2025 Pavement Preservation Program included a $400,000 overlay of Los Guilicos Avenue from Warm Springs Road to Randolph, and the park’s crosswalks have been freshly restriped — in the same old places. Repainting is precisely the moment a placement gets revisited for free. There may be history behind the layout — sight lines, drainage, collision records — and the Wag is putting the question to Sonoma Public Infrastructure; we will report what comes back.
The geometry is easy to check: the corner of Warm Springs Road and Los Guilicos Avenue on any map, or on foot with a picnic.