Andrew Boone

San Mateo County’s new Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee kicked off its first meeting on Thursday evening at San Mateo City Hall. Ellen Barton, San Mateo's Active Transportation Coordinator, proposed that they develop criteria for safer street striping ahead of the county’s annual resurfacing program. Other projects they discussed included establishing bike parking standards, evaluating progress of the county's 2011 bike/ped plan [PDF], developing Safe Routes to Schools programs, and supporting the county's annual bike and pedestrian count.

Last Thursday representatives from Caltrain, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) presented [PDF] current plans for building housing and offices on top of station parking lots, at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) in downtown San Jose. Rail station parking lots offer the ultimate in “Good TOD” - Transit Oriented Development that guarantees new transit riders while providing housing and commercial space that can be conveniently reached car-free.

After planning for the past decade to install express lanes on Highway 85, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is now pitching its $350 million sales tax funding request to widen Highway 85 as "transit lanes." On June 24, the VTA Board of Directors [PDF] struck any reference to "express lanes" from the Highway 85 project description that they had approved on June 2 along with $6.3 billion in transportation projects:

Menlo Park's plans to fix El Camino Real's safety hazards were postponed yet again by a city council that is now split on whether to go ahead with the installation of even a bike lane pilot project. Proponents continue to demand that the city take action to prevent injuries suffered by residents in traffic collisions.

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)’s half-cent "Envision Silicon Valley" transportation sales tax is now headed to the November 8 general election ballot in the county, after receiving the unanimous approval of the transit agency’s Board of Directors on June 2.

On Tuesday, Menlo Park's City Council postponed a pilot project to replace parallel car parking with buffered bike lanes on El Camino Real, deciding that neighboring Palo Alto and Atherton should also agree on a common design for bike lanes before proceeding with the permitting process required by Caltrans. Despite strong community support to fix the urban highway's safety hazards, the city remains content with today's configuration, after 11 public meetings held since April 2014 on the topic.

On March 3, the San Mateo County Transportation Authority (SMCTA) awarded $4.9 million to ten pedestrian and bicycle safety projects - $1 million less than the agency awarded two years ago. Agency staff had revised up the amount of funding for this year's Pedestrian and Bicycle Program to $5.7 million in February, but explained in the Board's March 3 report [PDF] that they had "corrected an error in calculation of the prior estimate."

San Mateo County's City/County Association of Governments (C/CAG) is leaving an expansion of Highway 101 with new carpool lanes on the table, even after the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) concluded they will jam up with traffic the day they open. If constructed--by 2024 at the earliest--a 14-mile section of the highway from San Bruno to Redwood City would be widened from eight to ten lanes at a cost of up to $250 million.

"Induced demand" is the idea that building and widening roads doesn't make traffic better--it makes it worse. Late last year Caltrans finally acknowledged that, yeah, it's probably true that all the work they've been doing for the past few decades has been for naught.

Public transportation becomes less accessible for low-income Peninsula residents and workers this year with fare increases for both Caltrain and SamTrans buses. Caltrain tickets go up by fifty cents on February 28 while SamTrans bus tickets were raised by 25 cents on January 10. Unlike Muni, neither agency offers discounted tickets to transfer between buses or between the train and buses, and neither offers a discount for low-income residents or students.