Bryan Goebel

This article is cross-posted from the blog of former Streetsblog SF editor Bryan Goebel, who's aiming to launch a new website "devoted to sustained coverage of biking, walking and transit issues in Sacramento, both at the Capitol and locally." You can also follow Bryan on Twitter.

East Palo Alto was recently awarded $5 million to build a freeway off-ramp designed a decade ago that even the city’s traffic engineer admits is no longer needed because traffic volumes are down. But as part of the project, the north section of the University Avenue overpass -- a treacherous but often necessary route for East Palo Alto residents who bike and walk -- would be widened to expand the skinny sidewalk to twelve feet and add a five-foot bike lane.

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

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.

San Mateo County has the third highest rate of driving mileage per capita in the Bay Area, behind Marin and Sonoma counties. Eighty-two percent of residents drive as their primary mode, due in part to a built environment that keeps people stuck in their cars. Low-income and transit-dependent populations who take the bus face dwindling service, while those who ride their bikes and walk face hostile street conditions, enduring dangerous highway overpasses to get to their jobs or school.

As San Mateo County’s congestion management agency, the City/County Association of Governments (C/CAG), is supposed to be responsible for reducing auto congestion. It also controls the purse strings on transportation projects, doling out millions of dollars in state and federal grants to the region’s 20 cities, whose appointed representatives make up the agency’s governing board.

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

Brent Butler was leading a bicycle rodeo in East Palo Alto for the city’s first Streets Alive event last year when he realized just how many children were there without bikes.

Burlingame is moving forward on a project to give its downtown boulevard a much-needed facelift, and planning a number of citywide bike improvements.

San Jose -- which wants its central district to become the urban center of Silicon Valley -- hopes to build the Bay Area's most bike-friendly downtown, where pedaling to work, school or the farmers market is "safe, convenient and commonplace" for people of all ages. The vision includes Long Beach-inspired bicycle-friendly business districts, where merchants would wholeheartedly embrace bike-riding shoppers and diners.