Cities, Counties, and Countries

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.

With a road diet, new parking configuration, and protected bike lanes on Telegraph Avenue, Oakland is saying to its car drivers: slow down, take it easy. And to its bike riders: you're welcome here and safe.

Note: This story has been corrected since it was originally posted. Thank you to sharp-eyed readers.

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."

Three California counties are considering transportation sales tax initiatives for the upcoming November ballot. Los Angeles Metro just announced its proposed expenditure plan today; Contra Costa is working on a draft proposal, and Santa Clara county has developed a scoresheet to help prioritize potential projects according to agreed-upon goals. Sacramento, Stanislaus, and San Francisco have made some noises about possible sales tax measures as well.

At a packed meeting last night, the Berkeley City Council approved a project to bring a long-delayed bike lane to Fulton Street, the site of a recent collision that seriously injured a cyclist.

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.

“Caltrans is prioritizing safety,” says Friday's press release announcing that the bike path on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be closed, beginning today, for the entire month of March.

"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.