Nation's Premier Bike Safety Organization No Longer Good Enough for Emeryville, Says Solomon
Nationally Recognized Expert Policy Best Practices Should Be Cut in Favor of Emeryville City Hall Staff Opinions
City Council member Matthew Solomon recently announced a surprising new proposal that would elevate the Emeryville city staff’s opinions as the highest authority on bike safety for our town, overturning the City’s decades long existing deference to the experts at NACTO, the nation-wide transportation authority and their use of rationally based industry best practices. The radical policy shift proposal would represent a retrenchment on bike safety according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), the organization the City currently uses to set bike and pedestrian safety protocols.
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Matthew Solomon Emeryville City Councilman Ironically, he ran for Council on a pro-bike platform. |
Solomon's proposal, if enacted, would turn Emeryville away from NACTO safety guideline expertise in favor of opinions from city staff non-experts and would likely result in compromised bike safety. It would also place Emeryville in higher litigation jeopardy should a bicyclist get injured in Emeryville it should be noted.
In a telephone interview with Matthew Solomon, the Councilman specifically said he would not vote for and he would encourage his colleagues to not support NACTO protocols for counting the number of vehicles using Emeryville’s bike boulevards, a practice the City conducted every two years for a decade before 2019. Further, he said does not agree with NACTO's delineated traffic volume allowable for bike boulevards (maximum number of vehicle trips per day). NACTO (and the City of Emeryville) recognizes that bike boulevards are streets that vehicles and bikes share and that the number of vehicles using the street must therefore be limited for bike safety. The way any city knows it is following the NACTO rules is by occasionally counting the vehicle traffic and then working to limit the number of vehicles as per their guidelines, keeping it below the upper safety limit.
The City of Emeryville used to conduct bi-annual traffic counts as NACTO dictates until business representatives complained in 2019 when the practice was abandoned. At the time, all five bike boulevards in town had more traffic than NACTO and Emeryville's General Plan allows. The amount of vehicle traffic in Emeryville has risen substantially since 2019, putting more vehicles on the bike boulevards and bikers in even graver danger, a fact Council member Solomon was unimpressed with in our telephone interview.
After telling the Tattler NACTO’s influence should be removed from Emeryville’s bike plan (known as the Active Transportation Plan (ATP), the Councilman said he would be amenable to amending the ATP at the Council level to achieve that goal. Currently, the ATP defers to NACTO best practices for bike boulevards and other bike corridors in town as well as pedestrian infrastructure.
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Lifted directly from Emeryville's Active Transportation Plan (page 39): the law of the land in bike policy. |
The City Council has always had the right to amend the ATP by fiat and if Mr Solomon is successful in convincing a majority on the Council to remove NACTO and the bike boulevard vehicle traffic limits from the ATP, it would be legal but unprecedented. It would represent the first time in Emeryville history the Council voted to amend the bike plan instead of ignoring it (as they done on our bike boulevards up to now).
Before 2019, the City conducted bi-annual traffic counts on the bike boulevards but then, despite the requirement to do so as spelled out in the General Plan, the counting stopped at former Mayor John Bauters’ insistence. The City never achieved the bike boulevard traffic volume goals stated by the City’s Bike Plan (and NACTO) it should be noted.
Several business owners in town, including Wareham Development’s CEO Rich Robbins, have long complained about how bikes hamper tenants getting to and from their buildings. Businesses have quietly lobbied sympathetic Council members to remove or at least ignore the boulevards, pleas Mr Bauters seem to have listened to as he hamstrung Horton Street bikers by quitting the vehicle counts and ignoring the duty to reduce vehicle traffic. Mr Robbins publicly supported a plan to remove the Horton Street Bike Boulevard and instead route bikers alongside the railroad tracks behind his buildings. In the intervening years, the City extended the Emeryville Greenway ped/bike path behind the buildings as Mr Robbins insisted they do but the bike boulevard still remains on Horton Street (albeit with too much vehicle traffic).
Mr Solomon is self described as a pro-bike Council member, having served on the Bike Committee for years. Supporters claim he is the biggest advocate for bicycling on the Council however Council member Kalimah Priforce, also a bike advocate who uses his bike or public transportation exclusively, doesn’t own a car and he has never even had a driver’s license. Mr Priforce, for the record, has stated he is in favor of limiting the number of vehicles on the bike boulevards as the ATP (and NACTO) says.
The Tattler invites Councilman Solomon to explain, in his own words, the dichotomy between his incongruent statements made to the Tattler and his claims of bike advocacy by use of the Tattler’s unedited ‘My Turn’ feature.
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2024 (a million years ago): On the campaign trail, candidate for Council Solomon was unabashed in his support for bikes and the ATP. He was not past going a little puerile and high-handed in his zeal. |