Streetsblog San Francisco

This early rendering conveys the potential for a landing and park on the west side of East Palo Alto. Click to enlarge. Image: Alta Planning + Design

This is part two of our series on the proposed bike and pedestrian overcrossing in East Palo Alto. You can read part one here.

During the public outreach for the proposed bike and pedestrian overcrossing in East Palo Alto, residents made clear to city planners and consultants that their main concern is safety. For decades, west side residents have been forced to cope with freeway traffic and congested intersections when they walk or bike to the grocery store or school on the east side.

“There’s a lot of traffic that comes through the city, both north/south and east/west,” said Casey Hildreth of Alta Planning + Design, which was hired by the city to design the overcrossing. “An alignment that can connect the community and really avoid as much traffic as much as possible is first and foremost our top priority.”

The bridge, expected to facilitate between 180,000 and 230,000 new biking and walking trips annually, would connect east to west over Highway 101 south of University Avenue. On the east side the access point would be in the vicinity of Clark and East Bayshore roads, and on the west side the landing would be on Newell Road.

Before the city can really focus on the design, it has to agree on an alignment. That is complicated by the fact that East Palo Alto is in the midst of a water crisis, said Hildreth, and the area where the city wants to build the overcrossing has been identified as an ideal location for water wells and towers. How, for example, would the city integrate a 76-foot-wide water tower?

“We’re working with city engineering staff to understand the contraints and requirements for those types of facilities and seeing if on either side of our bridge we can accommodate that,” Hidreth explained.

The city has narrowed down the possible alignments to three that provide the most direct connections to schools and services, and will begin a community process in December to get feedback on which one works best. The city is also conducting a survey of schools and collecting feedback from parents.

Read more…

Brent Butler, the East Palo Alto planning manager, leads Streetsblog on a tour of the University Avenue highway overpass. The bike rider on the right chooses to walk across the overpass. Photo: Bryan Goebel

Margaret Pye has been bike commuting from San Carlos to her job at a law firm in Palo Alto for the past 10 years. Pedaling home on Middlefield Road through Menlo Park and Atherton, there are bike lanes, but when she gets to North Fair Oaks in unincorporated San Mateo County, the bike lanes suddenly end with no signs indicating where bike riders should go.

“It’s kind of strange,” said Pye, 58. “When you proceed north and get into Redwood City, which is near the Costco, suddenly they’ve put things back in. It’s this little chunk where you’re left out in the middle of nowhere.”

Those kinds of connectivity issues are common in San Mateo County, where riding a bike from city to city can be a confusing and dangerous venture.

According to the San Mateo County Comprehensive Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, “between 2004 and 2008, bicyclist fatalities accounted for 8 percent of all traffic fatalities and pedestrian fatalities accounted for 27 percent” in San Mateo County.

While the plan, approved a year ago, envisions a connected network, bike and pedestrian advocates say it has no teeth, “especially in terms of reporting and monitoring,” said Gladwyn d’Souza, a pedestrian advocate and Belmont planning commissioner.

“It doesn’t have a system that says, you know, ‘We’re going to do this over the next 15 years,’” he told Streetsblog. Read more…

A highway overpass with a narrow sidewalk is the only connection for residents on the west side of East Palo Alto who need to walk or bike to access the east side. Photos: Bryan Goebel

This is the first in a series of stories on East Palo Alto’s proposed bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing.

It takes Maria del Socorro Macias about 40 minutes to walk from her neighborhood on the west side of East Palo Alto to her kids’ schools on the east side of Highway 101. To get there, she has to take a narrow sidewalk on the University Avenue overpass and walk through the city’s most congested intersection.

“It is very dangerous,” del Socorro Macias, 48, told Streetsblog through a Spanish interpreter. “There are numerous traffic lights to cross to get to the schools. It is especially dangerous walking at night, but I often do it because I attend school meetings and parent workshops.”

On foot and by bicycle, it’s a risky journey that countless East Palo Altans have been forced to take for decades, ever since the freeway sliced through their community. To visit friends, to get to church, to the library, or to Mi Pueblo – for now the city’s only grocery store — west side residents, many of whom have low incomes and don’t own cars, must contend with the freeway crossing and unforgiving street traffic.

“There’s a four-foot wide sidewalk that leads to the intersection with the highest traffic in the city,” said Brent Butler, the city’s planning manager. “It’s unsafe.”

A 2010 analysis noted that, among 97 California cities, East Palo Alto has the third-highest ratio of pedestrian collisions to the volume of driving.

Read more…

A conceptual plan for protected bike lanes and pedestrian islands on Second Street. Image: SF DPW

Following a public process that revealed a strong preference for protected bike lanes, the SF Department of Public Works yesterday announced the selection of the preferred option for the Second Street Improvement Project. And yes, the design includes one-way protected bike lanes on each side of the street. The redesign will extend from Market Street to King Street, connecting downtown San Francisco to the SOMA district.

The bike lanes will be separated from auto traffic by a four-foot, planted buffer, creating a safe and comfortable space for cyclists to travel through this important corridor.

From SF DPW:

The preferred One-Way Cycletracks option envisions protected bicycle lanes in both directions,
increased opportunities for landscaping and retiming traffic signals to separate bicycles from turning
vehicles. It also would entail removing parking on one side of the street between Market and Harrison
streets; removing all parking between Harrison and Bryant streets, and retaining parking on both sides
of the street south of Bryant Street. Left-hand turns may need to be restricted at some intersections
during certain hours of the day.

We’ll have more information as it becomes available, but for now you can read up on the Second Street Improvement Project and take a look at conceptual renderings of the bike lanes on SF DPW’s project website.

Construction will begin this month on physically separated bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements on three critical blocks of Fell and Oak Streets after the project was approved unanimously yesterday by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors.

Image: SFMTA

“This is such a game-changer,” said SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum. “I think when we make this small but critical gap more welcoming and bike-friendly, we really are going to see more people biking to work, to parks, to school.”

SFMTA crews plan to begin work in October on striping the Fell Street bike lane, re-striping parking spaces on nearby streets, and upgrading continental crosswalks, said SFMTA project manager Luis Montoya. Striping the Oak bike lane will require more work than the Fell lane, since the Oak lane will require a slight re-alignment of the three traffic lanes. The completion dates for each piece of the project will depend on the schedule of the agency’s paint shop, but agency staff hopes to have both bike lanes finished by winter on the three blocks between Scott and Baker Streets, he said.

Work on the 12 sidewalk corner bulb-outs and planted concrete bike lane barriers would be finished by next spring or summer. Although the SFMTA said earlier this month that the bike lanes may not be rideable during concrete construction, Montoya said crews would be sure to maintain temporary bike lane access. The project will also add bicycle traffic signals to give bicyclists and pedestrians a head start in the traffic cycle.

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe cheered the pedestrian upgrades included in the plan, which initially included only bike lanes. “The project will widen sidewalks at corners with 13 [originally proposed] bulb-outs, which is really quite a lot. I’d like to get to a point where it’s not a lot, but right now it’s a lot.”

As part of the project, the traffic signals on Oak and Fell would be adjusted to lower synchronized vehicle speeds from 25 MPH to 20 MPH, which will “help to start addressing the [traffic] speeds … that basically make it feel like we’ve got freeways running right through our city,” said Stampe. “For too long, Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle have been like islands in the middle of these freeway-like traffic conditions.”

Read more…

Polk at Geary, where a parklet is hosted by Jebena Cafe. Photo: Scott Sanchez, SFPlanning/Flickr

An effort to revamp conditions on Polk Street for walking, socializing, bicycling, and transit is underway by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, and residents say they’re eager to see calmer motor traffic, wider sidewalks, better bike lanes and more public space along the corridor.

At a well-attended SFMTA community meeting on Wednesday, planners said construction on the redesign of Polk, between McAllister (at City Hall) and Union Streets, could start by early 2015, though a pilot project could also be implemented to test ideas on the ground by the time America’s Cup races return next July. That project will be developed in future community meetings, but it could result in anything from temporarily widened sidewalks, to restrictions on car traffic, to protected bike lanes. Roughly $8 million in Prop B street improvement bonds are already devoted to the pilot, in addition to street repaving funds.

D3 Supervisor David Chiu, who has lived near Polk for 16 years, walks and bikes the street regularly. “It’s an experience that can absolutely be improved,” he said. “This corridor has enormous potential to be a 21st-century model of transit-first living. Whether it be ideas around pedestrian safety, around bike lanes, parklets, or bulb-outs, in ways that allow all for all the modes of transit to be used and builds community, the conversation is very exciting.”

Polk was one of the corridors where Dutch bicycle planners joined the SFMTA on a ride one year ago to re-imagine it as a more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly street using methods practiced in the Netherlands, which is known for its exceptionally safe street designs. The recommendations that resulted included expanding pedestrianized areas and providing continuous, parking-protected bike lanes — an idea also called for in the SF Bicycle Coalition‘s Connecting the City campaign as a safe, relatively flat connection linking Market Street to Fort Mason and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Read more…