City Decides Behind Closed Doors to Stop Conducting Traffic Counts Meant For Bike Safety

 Bi-Annual Traffic Count for Bike Safety Quietly Ended

Done Without Public Input

City Won't Say Why 

(But Councilman Priforce Knows Why)

Sometime between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2021, government officials at the City of Emeryville secretly met behind closed doors to stop and retract long standing bike safety public policy spelled out in the City’s Bike Plan that counts the number of vehicles using the bike boulevards in town, the Tattler has learned.  City Manager Paul Buddenhagen revealed in a recent email to the Tattler, there was a private meeting or series of meetings between undisclosed City employees at City Hall that took place where the decision to overturn the City’s Bike Plan and stop the bi-annual vehicle counts was made.  The meeting(s) were conducted before Mr Buddenhagen was hired he noted and he said he had no knowledge of of it until recently, regardless that the Tattler inquiry request for information started a year ago.  Mr Buddenhagen did not offer anything more about the meeting(s) but he did say he thinks the traffic counts are unhelpful because bike boulevards are not very good and that he prefers protected bike lanes. 

From Emeryville's Last Official Traffic Count, 2019
Every bike boulevard was unsafe because of too many cars.  It's gotten a
lot worse since then.  The City can't be held to account if it doesn't take account. 
Business owners' concerns take precedence over bike safety.

The counting of vehicles on the bike boulvards is meant to provide a Bike Plan backstop over which a regimen of traffic calming provisions are to be implemented for bike safety, often seen as an inconvenience for vehicle drivers and anathema to businesses. 

The Bike Plan was certified by the City Council in 2012 at a cost of $200,000. However bike boulevards have been ignored by the City since the beginning, as the bi-annual traffic counts show.

Council Member Kalimah Priforce
Traffic data is no longer being collected
because it shows too many cars on the
bike boulevards is "bad data" and is
 "embarrassing" for Emeryville.

Bike boulevards are described as streets where cars are allowed but bikes are preferred.

The surprising email from the City Manager came after a protracted year long Tattler fight to learn why the City’s bike boulevard bi-annual traffic count policy was not being followed anymore.  During that time, nobody at City Hall could or would answer our questions about it.  The last time the bi-annual traffic count was conducted (2019), it showed an excess of traffic on all five Emeryville bike boulevards and consequently, the City is on the hook for providing more traffic calming infrastructure.  Increased traffic calming measures on the bike boulevards have been strenuously objected to by several businesses in town, especially Wareham Development who have offices on the Horton Street Bike Boulevard.  Rich Robbins, CEO of Wareham, has been a contributor to many City Council members' re-election campaigns over the years.

Mayor John Bauters
Our bike boulevard network is not a priority,
"I've been doing a lot of other things" he said.

Use of the California Public Records Act has not brought any documents to light, bolstering Mr Buddenhagen’s suggestion that the non public meeting(s) conducted were meant to be secret.

Bike Safety is the stated reason why no bike boulevards should exceed 3000 vehicle trips per day according to Emeryville’s $200,000 Bike Plan.  The City says the 3000 number was incorporated by recommendations from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities.  The Horton Street Bike Boulevard had 4127 vehicle trips per day on it in 2019.  With the Sherwin Williams housing project now nearing completion and over 1000 new renters using Horton Street, that number has likely gone up considerably and bike safety has commensurately suffered.  But because the City has stopped the traffic counting, it remains an unknown quotient. 

Emeryville’s Bike Plan makes it clear that bike safety goes down on bike boulevards as the volume of car traffic goes up. From the Bike Plan:  

Volumes of motor vehicles determine the frequency of passing events; at 1,000 vehicles per day, cars pass a bicyclist approximately every two minutes, while at 3,000 vehicles per day, cars pass a bicyclist every 46 seconds. The rate of automobiles passing a bicyclist indicates the number of potential conflicts and affects the comfort of the bicycling environment.  Bicycle boulevards with volumes higher than 3,000 vehicles per day are not recommended.

The Bike Plan continues,

Counts should be conducted every two years. If a bicycle boulevard goal is not met, the City should consider treatments that will allow the bicycle boulevard to meet goals. If additional treatments are not possible, or if treatments are unlikely to result in conditions that meet the above goals, the City should consider a different type of bicycle facility.

Mayor John Bauters, who regularly likes to display how much he likes bicycling on his X (Twitter) feed, told the Tattler he doesn’t take our bike boulvards very seriously.  After he was informed at a recent public bicycling event, bicyclists are unsafe because of too many cars, he indicated he had other priorities, “I’ve been doing a lot of other things” he said.  He said he didn’t know why the bi-annual traffic counts had been stopped and didn’t express any interest in finding out.  Council member Kalimah Priforce on the other hand was quite forthcoming.  He said the traffic data is embarrassing for the City and that’s why the traffic counting has been stopped.  “Showing too many cars on bike boulevards is bad data for the City” he said.  He added, “It would be embarrassing if we’re telling a narrative that’s different than what the data reveals.”

Mr Buddenhagen for his part refused to say if the City would go back to following the City’s Bike Plan and resume the traffic counting. 

Council to Make Doyle Street Traffic Diverters Permanent

COVID-19 Delivers Emeryville's First Bike Boulevard

Newly Calm Street Very Popular

Could Other Bike Boulevards Also Get Traffic Calming?

News Analysis

The City Council has placed on its October 6th docket, the permanent closure of portions of the Doyle Street Bike Boulevard to vehicular traffic, a move that likely would bring the street into full compliance with Emeryville’s Bike Plan, a first for any bike boulevard in the City.  The Doyle Street Bike Boulevard, with its temporary ‘K rail’ traffic calming measures placed last April, is now safe for bicycling for the first time in years with fewer cars on it than the maximum allowed in Emeryville.   Every other bike boulevard is still unsafe for bicycling according to the Bike Plan, because of too much vehicle traffic.

The much reduced vehicle traffic load on Doyle has come about because the City of Emeryville, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, blocked some portions of the street from vehicle usage with the water filled plastic K rails.

The temporary K rail diversion was done administratively owing to its low cost and the COVID-19 emergency invoked by the City.

View of an Emeryville Bike Boulevard
COVID-19 made something better
in our town.
K Rails will be replaced with
permanent (more attractive)
concrete  barriers. 

The new traffic calmed street has become so popular in the north Emeryville neighborhood and among regional bike commuters, the City Council has been prompted  to vote to make the changes permanent.  Emeryville will be helped with this expenditure by Alameda County Measure BB funds the City announced.

The Council action comes as a ‘consent agenda’ item (10.7) at the October 6th meeting, a sign they will almost certainly vote in favor.  Consent items are grouped together in bulk and voted on without discussion barring some new negative revelations.    With funds fully secured to permanently add traffic diverters to Doyle Street, a 5-0 Council vote is near certain. 

The diverters have not only made bicycling on Doyle Street safe but also enjoyable, say neighbors.  The reduced traffic street has also helped Emeryville to finally be able to make a claim of bike boulevard legitimacy.  Ten years after the City Council certified its Bike Plan that calls for a network of five bike boulevards, Emeryville finally now has a legitimate bike boulevard in Doyle Street thanks to the diverters.  

COVID Upsets the Dominant Paradigm

The Bike Plan calls for traffic counts to be made every two years for each of the City’s five bike boulevards to inform the Council as to the necessity of increased traffic calming.  Each bike boulevard is only allowed a certain number of average daily vehicle trips (ADT) and any overage is supposed to set off a new round of prescribed traffic calming measures.  That’s the way its supposed to work anyway.  The highest level of calming according to the Plan is Level Five, or traffic diversion, as Doyle Street now has.  The City of Berkeley has used Level Five diverters to great effect to help bike safety over the years.  But Emeryville’s bike boulevards have never progressed beyond Level Three traffic calming despite traffic counts that have called for increasing calming.

Many years ago,  the late City Councilwoman Nora Davis famously announced Emeryville will never have traffic diversion like Berkeley and she would only allow up to Level Three traffic calming on any bike boulevard (signs and paint on the asphalt, no diverters).  She stated Levels Four or Five traffic calming would disrupt vehicle traffic and therefore not be tolerated here regardless of what the Bike Plan says.  That default policy has been followed ever since by every iteration of the Council, making the COVID traffic diversion for Doyle Street a paradigm shifter for Emeryville.

The newly safe Doyle Street could ‘go viral'.  The street is now so popular in the North Emeryville neighborhood, others might demand the Bike Plan be followed in their neighborhoods as well, forcing the City Council to add diverters on the rest of the bike boulevards.

Councilman Bauters Gets Full Funding For Emeryville 

Council member John Bauters sits on the Alameda County Transportation Commission and has been instrumental in getting the funding for the traffic calming needed for Doyle Street (and possibly the other bike boulevards in Emeryville).  Measure BB, passed by voters in 2014 allows for this kind of safe street infrastructure but Council member Bauters was able to convince his Commission colleagues to waive the normally required matching funding from the municipality.  Mr Bauters argued that Emeryville’s small size made the matching funds requirement an undue burden and that the spirit of Measure BB would be subverted if Emeryville were to be forced to pay as much as the big cities.  His colleagues agreed and Emeryville has subsequently been released from the matching funds requirement as has two other small cities in the County. 

 Emeryville's Latest Traffic Count Results (2019)

Every bike boulevard is shown to be in violation of the Bike Plan due to too much vehicle traffic. At only 4% over the maximum allowable traffic before the COVID pandemic, Doyle Street certainly has been brought into compliance with the emplacement of the diverters.  However the other four boulevards are in even greater need for traffic calming.  Will the Council follow the success at Doyle Street and make the other bike boulevards safe too?

New Traffic Count Report: Emeryville's Entire Bike Boulevard Network Unsafe

Mounting Traffic Puts Bicyclists in Danger

All Five Bike Boulevards Now in Violation 

A recently released report by the City of Emeryville shows an alarming rise in vehicle traffic that now exposes bicyclists to danger on every bike boulevard in town due to unsafe volumes of traffic.  The internal report, entitled Vehicle/Bicycle/Pedestrian Counts (Fall 2019), was generated as a result of a Bike Plan required bi-annual traffic count and shows a rapidly deteriorating environment for bicyclists in Emeryville as compared with the last traffic count conducted by the City.  All five bike boulevards in Emeryville are now unsafe for bicycling according to the City’s own metrics and one, the 45th Street Bike Boulevard, is saddled with vehicle traffic 96% in excess over the safe limit.

The City has been aware the increase of vehicles using the town’s bike boulevard network is putting bicyclists in harm's way for some time but up until this latest traffic count report, at least one bike boulevard has always been shown to be within safe parameters.  Now that the Doyle Street Bike Boulevard has gone over the limit, that can no longer be claimed.

From the New Traffic Count Report
Emeryville's High Average Daily Traffic Allowances: Not High Enough.
Palo Alto's bike boulevard network allows for a maximum of 750 ADT.

The bike boulevard network was created in 2009 as a response to Emeryville’s anticipated growth the new General Plan provided for.  It was determined at the time, some streets should be set aside as bike priority streets to allow for bicycling to remain a viable alternative to driving.  Emeryville spent $200,000 on consultants who recommended the City create a network of these streets, bike boulevards, based on how other cities have done it.  The business and developer community however, not wishing their driving clients/tenants be constrained, cried foul.  As the Bike Plan was being finalized, the City Council unilaterally increased the allowable traffic on the network (over any other city in the Bay Area) to mollify the business community's concerns, especially on the highly contested Horton Street where the allowable traffic loads were doubled.  Traffic however has risen apace since then and now, even that increased allowance for traffic on our bike boulevards is not enough.

Against this backdrop, the City Council has been unwilling to implement the traffic calming remedies spelled out in the Bike Plan to reduce the rising vehicle traffic to the safe-for-bicyclists minimum called out by the Plan.  Developers and businesses near the bike boulevards have repeatedly told the Council that the specified traffic calming remedies are unacceptable and these have been the voices the Council has listened to up until now.  The predictable unsafe traffic volumes now seen on the bike boulevard network is due to the Council’s inaction in this regard.

It’s Going To Get Worse

Already Approved: the BMR Project
2400 parking spaces netting 4800 driving
trips per day will be added to an already
overburdened Horton Street.

The recent leap in traffic is a portent for what is to come.  The General Plan targets Emeryville with a population of 16,600 residents by 2029, the Plan’s sunset.  Added to the increased driving population will be a dramatically increased business footprint.  These eventualities will likely add lots of traffic to our existing grid regardless of Council hopes for a wholesale turn in public sentiments towards public transit.   Additionally the City Council, entertaining overturning existing housing unit mix regulations to accommodate residential super towers such as the Onni project slated for Christie Avenue, has hinted the 16,600 mark is a number they intend to race past rather than target.

One looming non-residential project, the BMR life science 'Center of Innovation' slated for Horton and Hollis Streets, will include 2400 new parking spaces delivering a new glut of 4800 Average Daily Traffic (ADT) trips to Horton Street.  Adding to that number, the approved Sherwin Williams project with at least an extra 4000 ADT and an unspecified amount of traffic from the newly completed but not yet fully rented Transit Center, Horton Street, already 38% over the limit, will not be a street for conducive for biking regardless of the plethora of purple signage proclaiming its bike boulevard status.

The City Council effectively took Horton Street out of contention as a possible street for bike transit when they issued a 'Statement of Overriding Considerations' in the run up to the approval for the Sherwin Williams project in 2016.  The SOC stated that the project will overturn the Horton Street Bike Boulevard but the community benefits of the project outweigh bike concerns.
More recently, the Council decided to not implement the Bike Plan  traffic calming treatments for the 45th & 53rd street bike boulevards, choosing instead to let the clock run out for the two streets.  The remaining boulevards on the network, Doyle Street and 59th Street don't seem likely candidates for traffic calming given the City Council's lack of concern for the Bike Plan combined with an aggressive view towards growth the Council has exhibited over and beyond what the General Plan provides for and traffic, accordingly, will likely overrun these two streets as well.

Mayor Announces No More Bike Boulevards, Yes to Protected Bike Lanes

Two Year Countdown Clock Runs Out For Emeryville to Build Bike Boulevards

Mayor Responds: No More Bike Boulevards

The Mayor of Emeryville has taken a missed deadline in the City’s Bicycle Plan yesterday to announce she will explore finally scrapping Emeryville’s entire bike boulevard system in favor of a system of ‘protected’ bike lanes.  Mayor Ally Medina, who also serves as Council liaison to Emeryville’s Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC), made the surprising announcement in a recent interview with the Tattler in response to probing questions over the City’s recalcitrance providing traffic calming for the 45th and 53rd street bike boulevards.  The two streets are now past due to receive ‘Level Four’ traffic calming measures owing to an excess of vehicle traffic discovered during a City commissioned measurement of traffic two years ago.  Instead of providing traffic calming for the two streets, Mayor Medina indicated she will direct the BPAC to start discussions over amending the Bike Plan with an eye towards finally removing all bike boulevards, an idea she says has not worked well in Emeryville.

Mayor Ally Medina
She says bike boulevards'
time has come and gone
in Emeryville.

Bike boulevards are streets that allow vehicle traffic but are set up primarily for bike travel.  Vehicles and bikes share the street on a bike boulevard but vehicle speeds and volumes are managed by a traffic calming infrastructure.  Streets with protected bike lanes by comparison, are regular streets with physical separation between the vehicle traffic and bikes.  Usually, the separation is provided by bollards or concrete ‘K’ rail.
In Emeryville, the Bike Plan says the City has up to two years to move a bike boulevard up to the next highest level of traffic calming after a traffic count shows an excess of traffic on the street.  Bike boulevards here have routinely been moved up to Level Three traffic calming without incident but Level Four calming, a more rigorous push down against vehicles, has never been applied. The less restrictive Level Three traffic calming infrastructure involves corner intersection 'bulb outs' as well as signage and other such benign measures.

Ms Medina’s desire to finally kill Emeryville’s bike boulevard system comes at the end of a two year period in which the City should have installed temporary Level Four traffic calming for the two bike boulevards on 45th and 53rd streets.  Level Four traffic calming is defined by Emeryville’s Bike Plan as either ‘chicanes’ or ‘chokers’.  Both devices, using bollards, are meant to lower traffic volume to less than 3000 vehicle trips per day, a number that both streets have been in excess of as the Council commissioned traffic count from two years ago revealed.  A chicane is described as a “horizontal” traffic calming measure, a forcing of vehicles to wiggle side to side, whereas a choker is a narrowing of the street to one lane, effectively serving like a one lane bridge.

Level Four traffic calming has proven to be very unpopular with developers and the business community here although it is common in neighboring cities.  Developers, have publicly stated their desire to not have Level Four calming in Emeryville and it has never been used here.  Some Council members over the years have announced they will only go as high as Level Three calming on our bike boulevards despite the clear direction from Emeryville's Bike Plan that traffic calming goes as high as Level Five (traffic diverters).
The former Horton Street Bike Boulevard was removed from consideration for Level Four traffic calming in 2016 when the City Council signed a ‘Statement of Overriding Considerations’ (SOC) that posits the Sherwin Williams development on that street is more important than the bike boulevard and that the City has no interest in keeping traffic on the street less than 3000 vehicle trips per day after the development, with its 1000+ vehicle trips per day generated, was found by its attending Environmental Impact Report to be in conflict with the bike boulevard.  The street will have approximately 4000 vehicle trips per day including the traffic generated by Sherwin Williams.  Horton Street still has signs up claiming it to be a bike boulevard but the City Council, by signing away the Bike Plan’s provisions for it in the SOC, has said it will not place Level Four (or Level Five for that matter) on the street regardless how much vehicle traffic it has.

So 2019.

Mayor Medina used her influence to place bollards along Horton Street in 2018 it should be noted, after she received many complaints from bicyclists over vehicles blocking the bike lanes around the Amtrak train station at 59th Street.  The bollards themselves, consequently, have become a source of controversy as car and truck drivers complain they have no place to make drop offs or deliveries to businesses in the area.  These complaints, ironically, would not be happening if the City had enforced a bike boulevard for Horton Street because bike lanes are not to be used on bike boulevards and as a result, street parking, including yellow zones, could have been employed in that congested area.

Now that the two year clock has run out for the City for the 45th and the 53rd street bike boulevards, like the Horton Street bike boulevard earlier, Level Four traffic calming has been taken off the table with the announcement by Ms Medina.  The City Manager, Christine Daniel, whose job it is to place agenda items for the BPAC to consider, told the Tattler she will not allow the committee to discuss Level Four traffic calming for the 45th and 53rd street bike boulevards specifically but she will allow the committee to discuss Emeryville's bike boulevard system as a general thing, in October.  However, she did not say if the October meeting would be the time for the committee to take up the Mayor’s idea of eliminating bike boulevards in Emeryville.  Mayor Medina for her part, refused to explain the City's (and her) failure to implement the Bike Plan for traffic calming on the 45th & 53rd street bike boulevards, using the idea of eliminating the entire bike boulevard system as an indication the City has moved on and bike boulevards are no longer applicable here.

Emeryville's Bike Boulevard 'Treatment' plan may be viewed HERE.

The Tattler's 45th & 53rd Streets Level Four Traffic Calming Countdown Clock
This feature has been on the bottom of the home page for almost two years.
Yesterday it finally hit 00 days 00 hours 00 minutes 00 seconds.
The City couldn't or wouldn't install the traffic calming mandated 
by its own bike plan in that time.

History of Bad Bike Policy Nets the City of Emeryville a Countdown Clock

Introducing:

The 53rd and 45th Street Bike Boulevards 

Countdown Clock

City Council: Be Warned

The policy makers at Emeryville City Hall have a way of forgetting about programs they don’t much care for and insofar as these programs are mandated by the General Plan and have a prescribed implementation timeline therein, the Tattler has always been there to gently remind them.  However, even our rigorous oversight has not been enough to coerce the decision makers to implement the Bike Plan, the part of the General Plan that City Hall historically has had the biggest aversion to.  

Owing to this intolerable situation, the Tattler now introduces the 53rd and 45th Street Bike Boulevards Countdown Clock.  The clock will be located at the bottom of the front page of the Tattler (phone users will have to load the web version to see it).  It will remain until the City places the traffic calming measures on these two streets the Bike Plan mandates.  Alternatively, the City Council could amend the Bike Plan to remove the traffic calming requirements for these two streets and then the Clock would be taken down.

Every Two Years

The 53rd and 45th Street Bike Boulevards Countdown Clock is set to run out to zero on September 14th, 2019 at 5:00 pm, the latest possible time the City has to implement the next required level of traffic calming measures placed on the two streets.  The clock began on September 14th, 2017 after the required official traffic count was completed when the City became aware that there is too much vehicle traffic on the two streets.  The City conducts the traffic counts on every Bike Boulevard every two years as the Plan stipulates and if an “overage” of traffic is found, the City is required to emplace traffic calming measures, after which a new countdown begins.

It is hoped the City Council will look to the Tattler 53rd and 45th Street Bike Boulevard Countdown Clock in place of their staff who has been negligent in reminding them of their duties regarding the Bike Plan.  Since the staff has opined that temporary traffic calming measures need to be emplaced for at least six months before a new traffic count can be considered reliable, the Council is reminded the clock only records the actual time when the measures need to be on the roadways and it doesn’t take into account any internal scheduling policies.  
The City needs to do its due diligence and make sure the clock doesn’t run out without the next traffic calming measures in place on 53rd and 45th Streets.  Additionally, the Clock will not be reset except insofar as duly prescribed Bike Plan traffic calming measures are implemented.  And warning to the elected officials: the Clock will help serve as the people’s accounting device at election time.

Bike Plan Reinterpreted: 45th & 53rd Street Bike Blvds Languish

Bike Plan Unilaterally Reinterpreted

City Hall’s New Vision Means Traffic Calming Must Wait for Bike Boulevards

1,143 Cars Per Day Over the Allowable Limit

City Council Refuses to Protect Bicyclists

Level Four Goalposts Moved 

The City of Emeryville Public Works Department has announced it is unilaterally reinterpreting its Pedestrian/Bicycle Plan, adding additional procedures and making it more difficult to protect designated bike boulevards from excess vehicle traffic.  Elucidated in a recent letter to the Tattler, the City Hall staff generated reinterpretation changes the traffic calming ‘level’ system in the Bike Plan, adding many more steps to each level before a designated bike boulevard can move forward to the next level of traffic calming.

The new policy, revealed by the Public Works Department, states that “multiple iterations”, of a particular traffic calming level should now be conducted before the Council would be advised to consider raising the street to the more rigorous next level, theoretically adding decades before a bike boulevard would reach the highest level of protection (Level Five).

At stake is bicycle safety on our Bike Boulevards as the new interpretation hamstrings the City in effectively dealing with an unsafe amount of vehicle traffic sharing the road with bicyclists that the Bike Plan was formulated to protect against.  By adding new steps for each level of traffic calming, the staff presumes to speak for the Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) and the City Council that certified the Plan (without the stringent new metrics) in 2009.  It is informative that before the new staff interpretation, bike boulevards were moved up in level without these extra steps for each level. 

Indeed, several streets in our town have moved up from Level One to Level Three traffic calming over the years, where they now appear to be stuck, as is the case with the 45th Street and 53rd Street Boulevards. The new tougher policy now effecting these two streets will require more iterations of Level Three traffic calming elements be installed before they can move up to Level Four. 

If the City Council really wanted to implement
the Bike Plan, they could do it.  It's the
'stick to it' step they can't seem to accomplish.
It's either Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or 
Developer Surplus Disorder (DSD) indicated.
Symtoms are the same.
Remedies would be Ritalin or 
Electorate Reckoning respectively.

A recently conducted traffic count reveals those two streets are shown to have 1,143 (45th St) and 638 (53rd St) too many cars in Average Daily Trips (ADT) to be considered bike boulevards by the Plan.  But regardless of the excess traffic on these specific streets, the staff has ruled neither street is ready for a level ‘upgrade’ because of the new metric of “[up to] five elements” of Level Three traffic calming measures have not yet been installed.  
For a complete description of each traffic calming level, please see the chart below. 

The 45th and 53rd Boulevards join the former Horton Street Bike Boulevard in languishing; all three hitting a wall at Level Three traffic calming regardless of their excess vehicle traffic.  Notably, the previous head of the Public Works Department Maurice Kaufman and the previous City Council member Nora Davis both declared Level Four calming for any Emeryville street a ‘no go zone’; being too onerous for vehicles as described by developers wishing to build auto-centric projects near the Boulevards.  Accordingly, an earlier traffic count conducted by the developers of the Sherwin Williams project that also showed too much existing traffic on all three streets, was ignored by Ms Davis and the rest of the City Council.  Later, Mayor Dianne Martinez steadfastly and unilaterally refused to move the two streets, 45th & 53rd, to Level Four as the Tattler reported in 2016.

On Horton Street,  the City Council refused to institute Level Four traffic calming elements and instead issued a ‘Statement of Overriding Considerations’, stating the Sherwin Williams project is more important than the Horton Street Bike Boulevard and that the City would ignore the Bike Plan remedy for excess vehicle traffic.  The Statement of Overriding Considerations signaled to the community that the City Council has no intention of supporting bike boulevard status for Horton Street.  Regardless, before they were elected, both Dianne Martinez and Scott Donahue promised Level Four traffic calming for Horton Street.

The 45th and 53rd Street Bike Boulevards have not been subjected to a statement of overriding considerations but the City Council is continuing to let them languish, unrealized as bike boulevards.

The Bike Plan calls for traffic counts to be conducted every two years, a fact the Public Works Department now acknowledges even though the Department was caught lying to the City Manager about that in 2014.  The Tattler uncovered an internal document by use of a Public Records Request that showed how the Department was going to extraordinary lengths to prevent a street moving to traffic calming Level Four by attempting to get the newly hired City Manager Carolyn Lehr to ignore the Bike Plan.  In the memo, the Public Works staff told the new City Manager the Bike Plan says traffic counts are not to be conducted every two years, but rather only if a substantial construction project happens on the street in question or if a large number of citizen complaints are registered; an outright falsehood.  The Bike Plan is very clear that traffic counts must be conducted every two years without conditions.

The new interpretation of up to five required applications of Level Three elements (up from one) being ‘required’ may be the latest attempt by the City to stall implementation of Emeryville’s Bike Plan.  The City has felt no compunction against moving any Bike Boulevard speedily forward through Levels One to Three but they haven't thus far been able to make the breakthrough to Level Four, forwarding different reasons that change over time as to why it can't be done.  The latest prohibition against Level Four in the form of the unilateral Public Works reinterpretation seems to be just the latest blockage offered up by an ignominious City Hall.  It would seem the admonitions against Level Four traffic calming by the assailing Maurice Kaufman and Nora Davis made years ago are still the modus operating principles at City Hall.  

Bike boulevards are supposed to be "cars allowed but bikes preferred" streets meant to maintain bicycling as a safe and convenient form of transportation by discouraging motor vehicle use.  Developers and the business community have long tried to dissuade the City Council from enacting effective traffic calming on Emeryville's Bike Boulevards.

From the Emeryville Pedestrian/Bicycle Plan
Level Four=street narrowings, Level Five= full and partial closures
Level Four (and Level Five) have been determined to be too effective 
so the City has resisted implementing them on any street.  The City Council however has not 
seen fit to amend the Plan to remove these two highest levels they don't like, probably because 
they don't want to be perceived by the public as anti-bike.

From the Bike Plan
53rd Street is at the top of the photo, 45th on the bottom with Horton Street to the left.
North is up, east right, south down and west is left.
The Average Daily Trip (ADT) is supposed to be no more than 1500 for the eastern sections of
45th and 53rd Streets.

53rd Street From the Latest Traffic Count
The eastern section of 53rd Street has 2138 Average Daily Trips or
638 over the maximum allowable amount.  Since the street is now at Level Three, 
that should mean 53rd Street is a candidate for Level Four traffic calming elements.
The Public Works Department says NO however.

45th Street From the Latest Traffic Count
The eastern section of 45th Street has 2,643 Average Daily Trips
or 1,143 over the maximum allowable amount.  A City Council
that cared about bicycling would impliment
Level Four traffic calming elements for the street.

A traffic count from years ago east of San Pablo Avenue

showed 45th Street with more than 3000 cars per day.
Note the vehicle speeds are too high also.

Earns Two Smiling Nora Davis's
Nora Davis smiles down on
the Public Works Department 
and the City Council!

Council Says YES to EIR That Says NO to Horton Street Bike Boulevard

City Council Uninterested in Traffic Effects From Sherwin Williams Project Presuming Bike Boulevard in Place

Certified EIR Says Apartments More Important Than Bike Boulevard

News Analysis

Now there’s no other way to spin it; regardless of their pro-bike rhetoric, the Emeryville City Council doesn’t want to have a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  Bikes dangerously navigating a traffic clogged street with more than 3000 cars and trucks per day is OK they told us but a bike boulevard, a street safe for biking with less than 3000 cars, is not something they’re interested in, not if it means scaling back the Sherwin Williams project.  

At the September 6th council meeting the Emeryville City Council put the final nail in the coffin for the Horton Street Bike Boulevard when they approved the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the 540 apartment Sherwin Williams project, a project who’s scale is incompatible with having a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  Says who?  The EIR itself says it: the loss of the bike boulevard is going to be a “significant and unmitigated negative environmental impact” when the whole Sherwin Williams project is approved in October. In deference to the EIR, the City Council expressed their desire ultimately to sign a ‘Declaration of Overriding Considerations’, a CEQA document that tells the State of California the Council is aware of the loss of the Horton Street Bike Boulevard but that they think the Sherwin Williams apartment project is so good and so necessary that losing a bike boulevard is well worth that cost.  Adding more housing is more important than the Horton Street Bike Boulevard, Emeryville's most important north/south bike corridor says the Council.

Other than the years of delay they have proffered, how do we know the City Council isn’t interested in delivering a bike boulevard for Horton Street?  They told us as much.  When they certified the EIR the Council said YES to its traffic study that doesn’t reveal what the effects the project would have on neighborhood traffic if there was a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  The traffic study approved by the City Council only shows what the effect on traffic there would be if there is NOT a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  The Council had a chance to re-do the traffic study so they could know how the project would have effected neighborhood traffic with the Horton Street Bike Boulevard intact but they said they weren’t interested in that on the 6th.  And so they certified the EIR as it was.  

That means the City Council is either willing to commit a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) violation by negligently passing a bad EIR or they have no interest in creating a bike boulevard for Horton Street as Emeryville’s General Plan mandates. A violation of CEQA mandates would expose the City to a lawsuit, something incidentally the Council expressed worry over at the September 6th meeting.  The choice revealed at the meeting is that instead they’re going to (continue to) violate our General Plan with its requirement to keep traffic below 3000 vehicle trips per day.

The 540 unit Sherwin Williams project 

is incompatible with having a 

bike boulevard on Horton Street 

says the EIR. 

The decision to certify the Sherwin Williams EIR finally puts to an end the years of speculation and delay on implementing Emeryville's Bike Plan dictates for Horton Street.  Developers have said they are loath to allow a bike boulevard there and the Council has always placated the developer’s desires, even now the new "progressive" majority.  Developers have wanted to load Horton Street up with traffic to maximize their profits for their projects the Council keeps approving.
  

Bicyclists first alerted the City Council to the safety problems with excess traffic on Horton Street in the late 1990’s when the Bicycle Advisory Committee for the City of Emeryville put the need for traffic calming on the street front and center in the first Bike Plan that the Council certified in 1998.  The Council never delivered on the traffic calming the first Bike Plan mandated.  Later when businesses complained about the bike lanes called for in the plan, lanes that took away parking spaces for cars in the Park Avenue area, the business community lobbied the Council and the new Bike Plan, certified in 2012, took away the bike lanes but made Horton Street a bike boulevard instead.  Bike boulevards are supposed to be ‘bike preferred but cars allowed’ corridors.  

Businesses liked the fact that the new Plan retained the parking spaces for cars but developers soon started calling foul because of the limit on the number of cars the Plan requires for bike boulevards.  The Council responded to the developer’s complaints by ignoring the traffic calming mandates for Horton Street.  

The City of Emeryville never even tried the Horton Street Bike Boulevard idea.  The business and developer community was mollified instead.  The street has always been a car centric thoroughfare with more than 3000 vehicle trips per day.  The first Bike Plan failed to deliver traffic calming and the second Bike Plan failed to deliver less than 3000 vehicle trips per day.  What Horton Street has been and continues to be is just a regular street with funny purple signs and stencils on the asphalt.  It has never in 18 years complied with our General Plan.  

45th & 53rd Streets: Mayor Says Emeryville's Bike Plan Will Not Be Implemented

Mayor: Settled Bike Plan Not Needed,

Will Be Superseded

45th & 53rd Streets Won't Get Bike Plan Treatment 

Emeryville’s Mayor Dianne Martinez announced recently she intends that City Hall’s certified Bicycle Plan be superseded and a new set of extralegal metrics, identified by her and not voted upon by the City Council, take the place of the Plan’s previously adjudicated traffic calming measures for our bike boulevards.  Ms Martinez said in an email that two previously scheduled street improvements not recognized by the Bike Plan will satisfy the requirements to limit the number of vehicles using both streets and that the Bike Plan is unneeded.  The sentiments relayed by the Mayor represent the first publicly professed retrenchment or abandonment of Emeryville’s five year old Bike Plan expressed by a City Council member even though in previous deeds the Council has shown a propensity to disregard the Bike Plan.

Emeryville Mayor Dianne Martinez
We need not be locked in by our
General Plan or our Bike Plan,
we can make stuff up as we go along.

The City of Emeryville has identified 45th Street and 53rd Street as Bike Boulevards and thus subject to a General Plan/Bike Plan mandated program of directing vehicles to other streets known as traffic calming, to assure bicycle safety for these bike priority corridors.  However 45th & 53rd streets have languished since 2012 when the Bike Plan was certified by the Council, the two streets saddled with too many cars to be considered bike boulevards by City Hall and no interest up until now has been shown to rectify the unsafe condition there. 

Regardless of a 2015 traffic study revealing the extent of the unsafe vehicle traffic, an amount of traffic in excess of what’s allowed by the Bike Plan, the City has remained unmoved, doubling down instead on their insistence to continue to ignore the problem.  This has come in the form of a recent email from Mayor Dianne Martinez to the Tattler explaining that the City’s Bike Plan need not be enforced at all for these two streets.
The Mayor says traffic calming is coming to the two streets independently of the Bike Plan; a traffic circle for 53rd Street and a new crosswalk for 45th Street even though these are not identified by the Bike Plan as legitimate traffic calming measures.  Ms Martinez refused to qualify the two unrecognized traffic calming solutions in her email, suggesting she believes traffic calming methods are all the same as far as reducing traffic is concerned.  She answered the Tattler in the email, “In short, the City has indeed initiated traffic calming for these two streets. The City has started working with Pixar to implement a mid-block crosswalk/traffic-calming measure on 45th. On 53rd, the Emeryville Center of Community Life is constructing a traffic circle, which is a calming measure”.

The Bike Plan's regime of traffic calming measures was commissioned by Emeryville in a study by Alta Planning of Berkeley at a cost of $200,000.

The Bike Plan, formulated over two years by Emeryville’s Bike Committee with public input and with help from Alta, provides vehicle traffic metrics for bike boulevards, taking pains to note too many cars on a bike boulevard is unsafe.  The Plan gives a detailed prescription for what to do if too many cars are using the boulevard; a specific suite of traffic calming measures with increasing intensity (Levels 1-5) is the remedy for an excess amount of traffic. 

Mayor Martinez is disregarding the democratically (and professionally) agreed upon process laid out by our Bike Plan stating other measures, not included in the Plan that happen to be forthcoming on the two streets that she herself has identified as traffic calming, are all that is needed. 

Vice Mayor Scott Donahue, who ran as a slate mate with Ms Martinez and as an advocate for bicycles specifically, refused to comment regarding the Mayor’s would be new City policy for 45th & 53rd Streets.

The traffic counts revealing the excess traffic for bike boulvards in the area, including the Horton Street Bike Boulevard, were conducted in 2015 as a condition of the draft environmental documents for the Sherwin Williams development project.  The Bike Plan requires the City to conduct its own traffic counts to monitor its bike boulevards but none have been conducted so far.  The Tattler revealed in 2015 through a Public Records Request of internal documents at City Hall that the Public Works Director Maurice Kaufman was attempting to hide the traffic study requirements from the newly hired City Manager Carolyn Lehr.  This year the City finally has funded money to conduct the required traffic counts beginning in 2018, presumably as a result of the Tattler investigation.

The City of Emeryville is Anti-Bike

The City Staff Thinks Bikes Are OK*
*as long as they don't inconvenience vehicles

 Mayor, Vice Mayor 

Have a Staff Infection

Emeryville Mayor Martinez
Agrees with the staff:
Now is not the time
to implement the Bike Plan.
She's been infected.

Opinion
The people of Emeryville want a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  How do we know that?  Well, for one, because it's specified in our city's General Plan and our GP is the most democratically vetted GP of any in the Bay Area.  Our GP even won an award for the record high levels of support from the residents.  Further and more compellingly we know the people of Emeryville want a bike boulevard on Horton Street because that's what they directly voted for in November of 2014 when they cast their votes for Dianne Martinez and Scott Donahue both of whom were definitive at the time: a vote for them is a vote for the Horton Street Bike Boulevard they assured us.

The people like the idea of the Horton Street Bike Boulevard but the staff at City Hall sure doesn't.  In fact they've worked for years trying to make sure the traffic calming provisions spelled out in our Bike Plan don't come to pass on Horton (or any other street in Emeryville designated as a bike boulevard).

Vice Mayor Donahue
Agrees with the Mayor.
He's also infected.

The citizens voted for Dianne and Scott, finally getting a City Council majority that appeared to support the resident's desires for a bike boulevard on Horton Street....that's good.  But we were saddened when the two voted down the Bike Plan provision for traffic calming at the now infamous April 5th City Council meeting vote covered by the Tattler.  What's up with that?  They were very clear before the election they would vote for Level Four traffic calming as the Bike Plan delineates and then they reversed themselves and supported the staff who says NO to Level Four calming claimed to be something too restrictive against car traffic.

Staff Infection
The Mayor Dianne Martinez and the Vice Mayor Scott Donahue have been infected by virulent anti-bike sentiment festering at City Hall; they have a staff infection.  After listening to the residents before the election, now they're listening to the staff.  Whereas before they thought there should be a process and we should follow the General Plan's remedy for too much car traffic on bike boulevards, now they think like how the staff thinks; the General Plan is too radical, especially as it pertains to bike boulevards.  Dianne and Scott have joined a long procession of City Council colleagues who have been similarly infected: OK applying stencils to the streets or putting up purple bike boulevard signs but once drivers begin to become inconvenienced, well that's "too extreme" as the City Manager likes to put it.

The lengths the staff is willing to go to stop the Bike Plan's traffic calming is pretty exceptional.
To wit:

• August 2015   The Director of Public Works attempted to stop a required bi-annual traffic count on the 45th Street Bike Boulevard by falsely claiming the General Plan says such counts should only be conducted when there has been residential construction on or near a bike boulevard in question. The intended effect was to deny Bike Plan required data that would support the implementation of traffic calming.
• July 2015   The Director provided false testimony about traffic count documents when he reported to the City Manager that the 45th Street Bike Boulevard was below the threshold for Bike Plan mandated traffic calming.  A traffic count from the spring of 2015 (unmentioned by the Director) provided by the developers of the Sherwin Williams project that showed a gross excess of traffic on 45th Street according to the Bike Plan. 
• February 5th, 2016    The City Manager told the Tattler that Level Four traffic calming as described by the Bike Plan is "too extreme".  Earlier, the Public Works Director said any traffic calming beyond level three causes traffic to move inefficiently, something he says he's duty bound to stop.

The Staff
Their effect is corrosive and infectious on the
body politic if the Council doesn't inoculate
themselves with the disinfectant of 
independence and allegiance to the people.

What's also exceptional is the fact that our two newest Council members are so unexceptional; so far no Council members have shown a willingness to go against the staff on bike boulevards.  But what sets the Mayor and Vice Mayor apart is the iron clad promise they made to voters they would implement Level Four traffic calming on Horton Street if elected.  Other Council members have made vague references over the years to their support of the Bike Plan and about how much they like bicycling and other innocuous stuff.  Dianne and Scott bumped it up a notch with a specific promise.

We're still not sure why this overt bait and switch has happened (other than another outbreak of staff infection).  Vice Mayor Donahue has so far refused to comment.  Mayor Martinez has told the Tattler that while she agrees the staff has a jones against bike boulevard traffic calming that she doesn't share, she's too weak to stop them (presumably) and that Level Three traffic calming is the best we can do, "a bird in the hand..." and so on she said.

After a year and a half with these two progressives on our City Council, we've been worried that the same old pattern would repeat itself.  The fact that there's been no shake up at City Hall has proved to be a harbinger of the status quo being unperturbed by the new condition of a progressive Council majority.  One would expect a radical new direction selected by the voters to be reflected in a new culture at City Hall but these two decided to keep the same crew on.  The same department heads selected by the long ensconced pro-developer Nora Davis council majority have been left be in their corner offices, their power undiminished.  The resultant push back against Level Four traffic calming for Horton Street is what one would expect in such a scenario.

At least two more bike boulevards, 45th Street and 53rd Street, are now over their traffic thresholds and are over due for traffic calming as mandated by the Bike Plan.  After the progressives on the council joined their conservative colleagues in opposing the implementation of Horton Street traffic calming, we expect they'll do likewise for the other bike boulevards.  Barring some major change, we can't see the Bike Plan mandated traffic calming (over level three) being implemented for any street.

Emeryville; the more things change the more they stay the same.  Where's our Jonas Salk?  We're pretty discouraged here.

Emeryville City Hall Staff Doesn't Understand Bike Boulevards

"Like a Squeezed Balloon..."

Emeryville's City Hall Staff Can't Imagine

Bike Boulevards

Analogy for Sisyphean Meaningless Work: 
Squeeze it here and the air goes over there;
you've accomplished nothing says Emeryville.

News Analysis/Opinion
Sometimes a single utterance gives away the whole game...
When a feature of a democratically vetted new polity is described by those entrusted with promulgating it as a flaw, you know there's a fundamental lack of understanding going on.
And that's what's happening behind the scenes at Emeryville City Hall right now.

Case in point: when recently interviewing the department heads management staff, the same curiously quoted axiom kept coming up: the idea of the futility of squeezing a balloon as a stand-in for meaningless work.  What these paid staffers are referring to is our Bike Plan and its provisions for building a network of bike boulevards in Emeryville.
Bike boulevards are corridors set aside primarily for bicycles and central to that endeavor is the requirement laid out in the Bike Plan to strictly limit the number of motor vehicles using these specially designated streets.  The Plan seeks to force cars from the bike boulevards over to regular streets for the safety of bicyclists.  This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

"If the idea is to atomize traffic in town, 

trying to keep an equal amount 

on all streets that the balloon 

analogy reinforces, then there's really 

no such thing as a bike boulevard". 

And yet our City staff can't seem to understand this basic principle, hence the oft repeated balloon analogy.  What they don't understand, they don't want.  At its core is a refusal to accept bike boulevards.  If the idea is to atomize traffic in town, trying to keep an equal amount on all streets that the balloon analogy reinforces, then there's really no such thing as a bike boulevard.  And viewing their actions trying to stop the Horton Street Bike Boulevard specifically over the last couple of years, it's safe to say we now know the philosophic underpinnings to their work: they can't even imagine a bike boulevard.

City Manager Carolyn Lehr
A fundamental lack of cognition:
"Like a squeezed balloon, the traffic
will just go elsewhere, you're
not solving anything" she said
of bike boulevards.

Who has spoken of squeezed balloons at City Hall?  The top brass; our City Manager Carolyn Lehr, our Director of Public Works Maurice Kaufman and also at least one underling.

We call on the Emeryville City staff to educate yourselves about our General Plan, our Bike Plan and Bike Boulevards.  The squeezed balloon image that you've been citing as reason for your dismissive demeanor is actually how it's supposed to work; we're supposed to squeeze traffic off the bike boulevards and onto regular streets.  Remember, it's bikes preferred, cars allowed on bike boulevards.  So stop trying to subvert that basic premise and get with the program.

Yet Another Year Passes, Still No Horton Street Bike Boulevard

It's déjà vu all over again

December 31, 2015 is like December 31, 2014;

Bike Plan Still Being Ignored

Today, the Tattler brings back our ongoing end of December yearly feature: We re-post our September 2012 story (below) on Emeryville's Horton Street Bike Boulevard every December 31st and will continue until City Hall stops stalling and implements our Bike Plan as they are required to do.  This end-of-the-year feature serves as an annual clearinghouse for any news on the hold up of the Horton Street Bike Boulevard over the previous year.   
Readers bored or exasperated with the ongoing story of City Hall inaction on Horton Street can simply read the year end (short) synopsis in the italics preceding the September 2012 re-post every December 31st:  

I wake up every day, right here in 

Punxsutawney, and it's always 

February 2nd (or December 31st 

in Emeryville), and there's nothing 

I can do about it.

2015 Synopsis-

In 2015, nothing happened to implement the Horton Street Bike Boulevard.

In 1998, Emeryville adapted its Bike Plan after years of study and $200,000 spent on it.  In 2013, the City Council agreed to spend $10,000 to study the Bike Plan to figure out how to implement the Horton Street Bike Boulevard required by the Plan.  This $10,000 study is referred to as the 'study of the study'.  The Bike Plan doesn't call for any studies to be done to implement its requirements, it should be noted.  In 2014 City Hall held two community meetings about the study of the study but no action on Horton Street was taken that year or through to the end of 2015.  The 2013 authorized study of the study still hasn't even happened, raising doubts that the 12/31/16 re-post of this story will be any different than today's post.  
Especially disturbing this year is the fact that Emeryville voters elected the progressive City Council majority in 2014 and they have done nothing all year by way of delivering the Horton Street Bike Boulevard even though both Dianne Martinez and Scott Donahue both campaigned as being very pro-bike. 

As a side note: In 2014, City Hall found out another Bike Boulevard, the 45th Street Bike Boulevard is also in violation due to too many cars on that street.  Nothing was done in 2015 to fix that problem either.

Here then is the September 29th, 2012 Tattler story:

Major Traffic Calming Long Past Due For Horton Street

Emeryville's premiere bicycle thoroughfare, the Horton Street Bike Boulevard, has so much high speed traffic that it has become unsafe for bicycling.  So says Alta Planning, a Berkeley based urban bike network design firm that was commissioned by the City of Emeryville to study bicycling in town.  The $200,000 study, now incorporated into Emeryville's Bicycle/Pedestrian Plan and adopted into law by the city council lays waiting, ready to be implemented.

The question is, will it really be implemented or will it languish in some dusty corner at City Hall as so many other expensive studies have done?  Given the city council's baleful history of failing to calm the traffic on Horton Street for bicycle traffic and working to improve the street for vehicle use at the expense of bicycling, it seems likely it will be ignored and will remain a major automobile thoroughfare, unsafe for bicycles and becoming increasingly more so over time.  

Central to the Alta study is a limit on the number of cars that may use Horton Street, set at 3000 vehicles per day, before a mandatory set of traffic calming procedures kicks in.  The idea is that the traffic calming fixes will lower the number of vehicles that use the bike boulevard down below the 3000 maximum.  It should be noted Emeryville's 3000 number earmarked for bike boulevards is larger than any other city in the Bay Area. 

A choker is an example of a 'neck-down'
called for by level 4 traffic calming.

The prescribed traffic calming comes in a series of increasingly interventionist levels, one through five, that reduces traffic volume and speed, the last such level resulting in a total diversion for through traffic.  Each level requires two years to adequately assess its efficacy.  

At this point, Horton Street has already gone through the first three traffic calming levels; these involve street stenciling, signage and intersection "bulb-outs".  Now, since traffic has not subsided on Horton (it's actually increased), it's time for level 4 traffic calming to be implemented according to the Plan.

Level 4 calls for "significant traffic calming", specifically, 'neck downs' or traffic limiters such as 'chokers', designed to act like a one lane bridge permitting only one car through at a time.

Here's what the Bike Plan calls for on Emeryville's bike boulevards:

Level 1 Basic Bicycle Boulevard- signs, pavement markings

Level 2 Enhanced Bicycle Boulevard- way-finding signs, reduced delays at intersections

Level 3 Limited Traffic Calming- intersection bulb-outs

Level 4 Significant Traffic Calming- neck-downs

Level 5 Traffic Diversion

Level 5 calls for diverters: This
is called out only if level 4 doesn't
work after two years.

The problem is the Bike Committee has already twice voted on significant traffic calming for Horton Street in years past.  Both times the city council has overridden the committee's findings.  The last time the committee voted unanimously to add such calming, councilwoman Nora Davis explained her veto to the committee, "I have no problem putting paint on the asphalt [pavement markings]" but anything more dramatic than that would draw a veto from her and consequently also from the council majority.

In the intervening two and a half years since the last council veto shutting down Horton Street traffic calming, the city has commissioned and now encoded the $200,000 Alta study.

While we acknowledge Ms Davis' forthrightness in explaining to the people why they shouldn't expect safe biking routes in town, we call on the rest of the council to abide by the new Bike Plan they have adopted.  The fact that other such documents have been subverted in the past by the council should not serve as a precedent for inaction on Horton Street.  It's never too late to start working towards livability and rational public policy.  Let's make bicycling safe on the Horton Street Bicycle Boulevard.  It's time for a choker on Horton Street.