Petaluma is a especially nice little town. It has a cute downtown with nice restaurants, walkways, nice movie theater, lots of trees, and cute boutiques. In fact it also has many parks for children or for just hanging out at. Overall, it is a good town to grow up in and is very safe. Petaluma is a city in Sonoma County, part of the North Bay sub-region of the San Francisco Bay Area, located 37 mi north of San Francisco. Its population was 57,941