If you’ve recently traveled down Madonna or Los Osos Valley Road, you’ve likely noticed the extensive road maintenance impacting those two major corridors.
While the work might look like basic street resurfacing, there’s actually more to it. Once the roads are paved and striped, Madonna and LOVR will don jumbo-sized bike lanes, with two to three feet of additional buffer space, which in turn will force the vehicular lanes on Madonna to narrow.
“We want to make it easier to transition to protected bike lanes,” said Luke Schwartz, a SLO transportation planner. “It’s something we’re going to be exploring in our next bike plan update.”
Madonna and LOVR’s bike-centric reworking is a fitting symbol of the broader push by SLO to encourage and accommodate bike and pedestrian transportation over vehicular transportation in the city—a push that its leaders believe will trigger a citywide transportation “modal shift.”
“We’re moving toward a driverless future,” SLO Mayor Heidi Harmon told New Times in a recent interview.
The mayor’s statement is reflected in the city’s policies and planning. The City Council named multi-modal transportation as a top five “major goal” in the 2015-17 budget cycle—and did so again for 2017-19. SLO has a Bike Transportation Plan, a master bicycle network vision of sorts adopted in 2013 that loosely outlines what new bike facilities are on the docket.
The list is extensive. There are nearly 50 bike facility projects in the plan, ranging from protected paths to road widenings to accomodate bike lanes, to bike bridges, to roundabouts, and more. This year, the city budgeted for an update to the bike plan, which Schwartz said will end up incorporating some of the new residential development projects like San Luis Ranch and Avila Ranch, as well as sprinkle in “more innovative treatments that are now standards” for bike paths.
While the bike-friendly vision is supported by some residents and city leaders like Harmon, not all of the projects have been embraced by the neighborhoods that are impacted. Look no further than the Broad Street Bike Boulevard—which plans to wipe out one side of car parking in the North Broad neighborhood to create a protected bike boulevard stretching from downtown to Foothill Boulevard—to see the bubbling concern about the vision.
“I see this as an unworkable situation. We can’t take any more loss of parking,” said David Glidden, a Chorro Street resident who spoke against the boulevard at a City Council study session in August.
“Our town cannot support what you’re doing,” added Madelyn Ropner, another neighboring resident. “We’ve got too many people trying to [drive] north and south, and we just can’t accommodate changing the roads for the bicycles right now.”
But for SLO leaders, it’s all about changing the roads for bicycles. As officials explain it, adding more bike paths and boulevards is meant to instigate a fundamental change in people’s commuting habits, not to cater to the existing cycling community.
“The idea of this project is not to improve conditions for folks with spandex and $4,000 bikes,” Schwartz told New Times. “It’s trying to attract folks with children, people who are maybe not avid cyclists, but would if they felt a little more comfortable.”
According to city officials, the best way to do that is to create the safest possible bike routes—protected paths ideally separated by a physical barrier. But those can also be the most intrusive types of projects to traffic circulation, according to opponents.
“I’m sure the rest of the town is very much in favor of this until you put the bike lane in front of their house,” explained resident Glidden.
Schwartz, the SLO planner, called the Broad Street Bike Boulevard one “really important connection” between two ends of the city, but it’s not the only one in the works. The Railroad Safety Trail Plan is another, aiming to provide a direct bike path from Cal Poly to downtown, alongside the Amtrak railroad.
Additionally, an ambitious bike trail that would connect Foothill Boulevard with Madonna Road behind Cerro San Luis Mountain—called the Laguna Lake Bikeways—is in the plan. More bike boulevards are planned on Islay Street, Toro Street, Buckley Road, and others in town.
Despite neighborhood and car commuter resistance, SLO doesn’t seem to be slowing in its push for bike friendliness. In some California cities, the bike-centric paradigm shift has brought about vicious political backlash. In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Mar Vista, for example, City Councilman Mike Bonin is facing a recall campaign due to his support of narrowing Venice Boulevard to accommodate a protected bike path.
But for SLO’s top official, Mayor Harmon, the bike plan is a key component to achieving an even loftier goal of hers: net-zero emissions status. To hear Harmon talk about climate change and the importance of cutting out fossil fuels is to listen to someone ready for the driverless future.
“Change is always tough,” Harmon said. “We’ve had these paradigms for our whole existence, for 100 years. … We are no longer prioritizing the automobile.” Δ
This article appears in Nov 2-12, 2017.
There will always be folks who balk at change because it disrupts their sense of control in the world, but they are usually on the wrong side of history. Like it or not, bicycles are becoming more popular as people who embrace the future recognize the need to stop relying on fossil fuels.
I’m 70+ years old. My bike riding days are in the rear view mirror. The Bike Boulevards are simply very expensive and for a limited audience.
Net-zero Emissions Status is fine. We all need to do what we can to protect our globe. But then to use those words and at the same time not vigorously support Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is the height of hypocrisy. Nuclear power must be included in the zero-emissions mix if we are truly going to go forward to a cleaner environmental future. And our communities will be devastated when the plants close in 2024 and 2025 – while still paying for the effects of a Bike Boulevard mentality.
Sad
“I’m sure the rest of the town is very much in favor of this until you put the bike lane in front of their house,” explained resident Glidden.
Please put one in front of my house. It would be refreshing to see a street with more people (and kids!?) breathing fresh air, and less people driving at reckless speeds through their usual “short cut.” Maybe Glidden would consider putting his house up for sale and moving to the mid-west?
Amtrak not Amtrack.
Any changes to help make SLO more bike-friendly would be very appreciated by my family. We would bike commute to work and ride our son to school if there were safer, easier ways to bike across town.
If we’re headed toward a “driverless” future, which apparently means there won’t be any cars on the road, then why do we need to spend money creating bike lanes? With no cars, the bikers will be able to use the entire roadway at their discretion. I support all forms of exercise but this makes little sense to me. Cars are not going away. If they want to promote biking/walking then they should create a Pedestrian Zone on several blocks of either Higurea and/or Marsh streets where no cars are allowed.
I became a league certified instructor for the League of American Bicyclists because I heard so many people saying, “I would bike, if only it were safer,” and I wanted to be able to help overcome that fear. Cheers to the City of SLO for prioritizing the effort; now we just have to figure out non-city resident commuter circulation that serves neighborhood safety for the long term, and we will be good to go. If you’re interested in taking up cycling, please feel free to reach out. There are ways your barriers, thoughts and experiences can help inform the upcoming bicycle plan to make this a safe and comfortable transition for all. If you don’t know how to get involved to provide input, City of SLO Bicycle Advisory Committee and Bike SLO County are great first steps. For parents with kids, the Safe Route to Schools program at your school is another great way to get the right changes for how you use (or want to be able to use) our City streets.
On the flip side, the loss of parking and vehicular facilities is going to be a tough transition to work out. A focus on long term planning that serves solving some of the current–and anticipated future–issues for motor vehicles traveling in and through the City of SLO would be really helpful in alleviating the stresses of this transitional period. Plus, for parking-congested areas, looking at some new public or private mass parking facilities might be really helpful–allowing people to park when they get to town, and use bikes once they’re here. Yes, some new facilities may have environmental impacts, but sustainability minded planning and mitigations can help ease those burdens. And, in the long term, the net effect on the community and environment would be beneficial for drivers, commuters, residents in need of parking and bicyclists.