By Beryl Forman & Sam Ollinger
Photo: Bikesd.org
Last year, SANDAG began the work of implementing their Early Action Projects that are part of their 2050 Regional Bicycle Plan. Within the City of San Diego, SANDAG is currently working on the design of the Uptown and the North Park/Mid-City regional bike projects both of which are currently in the design phase of implementation.
The design phase of the implementation process to date has included putting together the working group composed of over 40 individuals representing a wide variety of stakeholder interests for each of the two urban core projects. The draft plan initially presented by SANDAG to the working group provided a skeleton of a map that was designed to get the working group efforts to coalesce around some specifics on where they thought the bicycle facilities to be implemented would be most effective and most utilized.
In developing a regional bicycle network, SANDAG planners are expecting to see an increase in the number of people choosing a bicycle as a transportation mode. Given the population increases being projected by SANDAG, redesigning our city streets to be less terrifying and more inviting would certainly go a long way toward accommodating all modes of travel including that by bicycle.
For years, only 1% of San Diegans have been taking to the streets on a bicycle and for good reason– a lack of a region-wide and comprehensive bicycle network composed of protected bicycle facilities has not been a top priority for our city.
The initial discussion of the two urban bike projects focused around the reasons why most San Diegans between the ages of eight through eighty weren’t comfortable riding on the busy, commercial roads such as University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard. While the SANDAG maps included several hundred ‘community assets’ and other gathering places that exist along these main corridors, the existing bicycle network does very little to connect people to these destinations. The draft plan presented by SANDAG was focused on placing bicycle facilities on the existing bike network – the side streets that run parallel to these commercial corridors on residential streets.
Mayor Filner Announces CicloSDias with the Living Streets Coalition.Photo: Move San Diego
To support good active transportation planning and bike safety, a majority of the committee members that comprised these working groups expressed displeasure with SANDAG’s draft plan. The reasoning behind the displeasure stemmed from the reality that the side streets were (relatively) safe in their current state in comparison with the commercial corridors which is dominated by fast moving traffic. It is these commercial corridors that need and can benefit the most from the investment that SANDAG is looking to make in the next two years.
Furthermore, local businesses rely on customers that ride bikes, walk, utilize public transportation, as well as drive. If the goal is to improve San Diego’s neighborhoods like Mayor Bob Filner has in mind, we can not allow these commercial corridors to remain in the state they are – which is unsafe for everyone including those who drive.
To pick one of these corridors, El Cajon Boulevard connects many neighborhoods in San Diego. It also has the advantage of being the most direct and level street to get people from one neighborhood to another – important considering that many of the side streets have steep inclines that most people would find challenging to ride up. Additionally these parallel side streets don’t connect the neighborhoods in as direct of a manner that the commercial corridors do.
With businesses including restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, bars, music venues, and hundreds of other service oriented destinations already existing on these corridors, SANDAG would be doing the local business community a huge disservice by not improving the main commercial corridors for customers who want to patronize these venues by bicycle. At the Mid-City neighborhood planning meeting, one working group member stated that SANDAG’s draft plan was great, as long as one wasn’t interested in going anywhere.
In the field of urban planning, the term ‘complete streets’ is a goal of many urban planners and municipalities. The idea is that streets must safely accommodate people who want to walk, bicycle, drive or take transit. During the course of this design process, SANDAG has done little to demonstrate that they do intend to implement a Complete Street as part of the Early Action Project program.
To achieve great neighborhoods within the region, the City of San Diego in collaboration with SANDAG must focus on implementing a regional bicycle plan that gets people around safely to where they need to go. This will simultaneously result in our region attaining statewide policy goals of improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions while also boosting our local economy, improving public health and making San Diego that much nicer of a place to be in.
For more discussion of this topic read here and here.
Beryl Forman is the Marketing Director for the El Cajon Blvd Business Improvement District, which includes North Park and City Heights. She is currently working on her Master’s degree in City Planning at SDSU.
Samantha Ollinger is the Executive Director and Board President of BikeSD. She has a vision to transform San Diego into a world-class bicycle friendly city. She and two friends originally created BikeSD.org to change the conversation about bicycling in San Diego. She now has formalized the site into a non-profit organization that will push San Diego in reaching its potential as a world-class bicycle friendly city. You may reach Sam at sam@bikeSD.org
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Why isn’t that guy on the bike smiling?!? Bicycling is fun! Yawhoo!
A great bike network for San Diego – on paper. Does white paint make a bikeway or stop a 3 ton vehicle? After two close calls I refuse to share the road – mixing cars and bikes on the same pavement is a bad and dangerous idea. Painting symbols on the pavement without benefit of public dialogue invites the driver or bike rider to embrace the rules of the road that best suits them. Bike deaths are on the increase. For a model to follow look at Copenhagen Denmark with the equivelant of biking highways with intersections and signals. In a town who’s transportation authority MTA sees public transportation as little more than supplanting private cars, where SANDAG sees more lanes of freeway as the only vision for the next 40 years, I find it nearly impossible to think SANDAG will overcome their disabilities. Then again the city went ahead and built a new library without any idea of how to pay to run it.
JEC: We’re not big fans of those markings on the roads shown in the top picture (the sharrow). Not sure why SD FreePress picked that image to go with our writeup – but we are definitely advocating for the sort of facilities you see in Copenhagen, Montreal and Amsterdam and now in New York City and Washington D.C. Sharrows best serve as way finding signs or as directional markers on traffic calmed streets. Putting them on high speed thoroughfares or busy streets is not something we support.
Sam – it’s nice to know – some say it’s aiming to high – but it’s what’s worth doing. Might I encourage BikeSD to recommend to Mayor Filner and the City Council to direct their representatives on the MTS Board to declare a policy goal of making the private car unnecessary. Not much I know, BART used it 40 years back and well, it seems to work, so for San Diego it’s a start. Then SANDAG to start working on such a goal and integrate dedicated bike roads into the overall solution. A private car consumes 20-25% of personal income. For younger people often more than rent. Imagine the improvement to our quality of life by cutting out such a large expense.
That’s not a high speed road. It’s Congress St in Old Town, approaching Taylor St. It’s a 25mph zone.
It’s also a dangerously misplaced sharrow marker.
Beryl + Sam – Great stuff and thanks for your efforts to make real, positive changes to bicycling infrastructure and the tone of associated conversations in San Diego. Looking forward to the future and best to you both.
treating bicycles like cars is a wrong idea…. better to treat bicycles like pedestrians…
when I ride on the street, I obey (more or less) the street laws and give cars priority; when I ride on sidewalks (mostly for safety from cars) I act more like a pedestrian, and give walkers priority…
bikes have ultimate flexibility in every sector, so let’s acknowledge that in urban design
In other words, bicyclists have the least right to travel of all travelers regardless of where they are? That’s your argument? Really? I am not a second class citizen. I have just as much right to travel as anyone else.
Bicyclists are not pedestrians. Pedestrians move at speeds of 2-3mph in relatively random unpredictable directions. Bicyclists move at speeds of 10-25mph and move in relatively consistent predictable directions — just like vehicles.
I rarely ride on the sidewalk but when I do, it’s for short distances at low speeds. Bicycles and pedestrians don’t mix. Bicycles do just fine on the road. I ride on the road almost every day. Try taking a safety class from the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition. It is possible to ride safely on most roads.
Just like drivers and pedestrians, bicyclists will use streets that have the destinations they want to go to, i.e. commercial corridors. SANDAG has to recognize that cyclist will be sharing the road with higher speed vehicles regardless of alternative routes on residential streets. If you want proof of this look at the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System. This dataset has all law enforcement reported collisions, including bicycle collisions, for the entire state of California. You can access this data on a free GIS interface at tims.berkeley.edu. Based on a quick look at the mapped data, it appears that in the last 10 years, El Cajon Blvd and University Avenue are the two east-west corridors with the highest concentration of vehicle-bicycle collisions in the City of San Diego; University also had the highest number of fatalities. 5th and 4th streets are the north-west corridors with the highest vehicle-bicycle collisions. Also 30th between El Cajon and Lincoln appears to have a relatively high concentration of vehicle-bicycle collisions. Downtown San Diego appears to have several collisions that are just randomly spread throughout. A complete network in that part of town would reduce these collisions. If the goal of bike infrastructure is to protect vulnerable cyclist then these streets need to be part of the conversation.
Based on the safety benefits alone, the Federal Highway Administration Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) will fund up to 90% of the cost of bike lanes on streets with high vehicle-bicycle collision rates. This years funding cycle will start later in April. I suggest that someone at SANDAG or the City of San Diego purse this funding option. Based on it’s population, San Diego should be eligible for up to $8M, which could build at least 1oo miles of bike lanes. The City of Los Angeles is funding 43 miles of bike lanes in 2013-2014 with $2.4M in HSIP funds.