You don’t want this little girl to not have a bike lane, do you?
If some or all of the above apply to you mark your calendars for Wednesday, March 6, from 6 to 8:30 PM. SANDAG is holding the second open-to-the-public meeting soliciting community input for the North Park – Mid-City Bike Corridors Project. The meeting will be held at the Sunset Temple in North Park at 3911 Kansas Street, San Diego, CA 92104. If you’re looking for a spot to park your bike one of the city’s 4 bike corrals is conveniently located two short blocks away at the corner of North Park Way and 30th Street. Bonus: the corral is right outside The Linkery restaurant which features Belgian-style drafts for $4 on Wednesday nights.
Think this is just another meeting to attend, voice your opinion, and have no real-world result for the investment of your time and efforts? Well, you might be right. But SANDAG has ponied up approximately $1 million for the planning and preliminary design stages of this project. I’ll take that as a sign of serious intention and kudos to SANDAG for committing dollars, time, and talents to transportation infrastructure other than roadways for automobiles. We may have mimicked Los Angeles for the title of our upcoming CicloSDias event but hopefully we can refrain from following their lead into the 8th circle of Hell aka Freeway World.
If you’d like to attend the meeting please kindly send an RSVP message to the project manager, Bridget Enderle, at bridget.enderle@sandag.org. If you can’t attend the meeting you can also send a message her way with your input in advance. Additionally, you can request to be added to the email list for notices of future meetings by sending an email.
Don’t live in this project area and feeling left out? Fear not, SANDAG has also committed $864,000 to planning for a similar project in the Uptown area so those of you in Mission Hills, Midtown, Old Town, and Little Italy can feel special too. If you’d like to be informed of upcoming meetings on this project drop a line to project manager Beth Robrahn at beth.robrahn@sandag.org.
Still not enough love for bicyclists in the county? How about $1.85 million for those in the North County enclave of Oceanside? Part of a plan to build a 44-mile bike trail from Oceanside to San Diego, a new 2000-foot segment is being built to add to the existing Class 1 bike trail. A Class 1 bike trail is physically separate from vehicle traffic. (Read: Awesome!) This project has already been planned and construction was slated to be completed in summer 2013 although the construction update section of the SANDAG site has no information on current progress.
Moral of the story: show up and speak up at these meetings if you care about bicycle issues. San Diego has some good momentum going to create a more livable city (walkable, bikeable, sexy) but it will need to be maintained to ensure projects are completed.
John P. Anderson
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SanDag seems to have committed itself to the bicycle as urban transport,
which is a lot more than sport. In a town like San Diego, where weather
makes it possible to ride 300 days a year this government project is full
of real potential. Get up! Show yourself at the meeting. They’re talking
about an east-west corridor from La Mesa to downtown San Diego.