I went to the League meeting for instructors at a hotel east of the airport, and it was difficult to find the bike path starting from Diridon multi train station to around the airport. The path that starts out is hard to find (even with a map), and then ends aruptly with no signage.

The high speed volume, arterial that one is dumped on to next is no picnic, either.

The article is also missing discussion of some of the other E’s – there seems to be encouragement, and engineering, but Equality, Enforcement, Education, and Evaluation are not so evident in the writeup.

Copenhagen hasn’t hit 40 % mode share yet, and they’ve been at it for 40 years, not ten. They’ve taken incremental steps, not unlike what SJ has proposed and they’ve done it over a generation, not a decade.
http://tcstreetsforpeople.org/node/457
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rstEWMD89L8

A’dam is just at 40%
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/11/in_copenhagens.php

Any city in this country would be thrilled to add 5% mode split in 10 years, especially one starting with a baseline like SJ

Probably 240 out of 250 miles of those bike lanes are on the high-speed arterials. These are roadways with 45mph posted speed limit, and 55mph peak speeds. It is like cycling on a freeway, with the added benefit of driveways and possibility of dooring.

That being said, John Brazil is very knowledegable, and good at his job. I wish him well, but the reality is that he is attempting changes in a city extremely hostile to anything other than SOV travel. This is reflected in the ridiculous low bar they have set of only 5% bicycle mode share by the year 2020. By comparison, places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam managed 50% increase in mode share in the same amount of time.

It will be a hugeormous investment to make the city more bike-friendly:
-sharpen all the rounded street corners
-make all traffic lanes 1 or 2 ft. narrower, city-wide
-add some of the wider streets to the street-sweeping schedule where bikers’ paths have a lot of junk on the ground
-add sheltered, gated bike parking at popular destinations, and even just a couple plopped down near a street corner downtown
-remove some unneeded traffic lights. s.j. loves to add traffic lights where stop signs would be sufficient. these make biking a pain, because sure you might sometimes get a green light, but lights are never going to be synchronized for bikes, and stop signs are great because you can just slow down and roll through safely and s.j. cops do not bother you.
-remove curb cuts, actually increase on-street parking spots (to slow down drivers on the street and drivers entering and exiting driveways)

just some ideas…

In comparison, SF has something like 45 miles of bike lanes (20 miles of which are useable) and 6% of residents commute by bike.

really, every train station needs this type of treatment. but in a case like diridon, where where the station has been segregated from the rest of society by a vast network of anti-pedestrian, anti-bicycle car tracks, this type of treatment is the absolute minimum required to begin to see actual benefits for spending gajillions of dollars on heavy rail infrastructure.

a station station like Diridon, without bike and walk access, is not a train to nowhere, it’s a train from nowhere.