East Bay Bike Leader Says Emeryville is Anti-Bike; City Hall Complicit, Possible Misuse of Funds Alleged

From the East Bay Bicycle Coalition Blog:

Emeryville City Attorney, Traffic Engineer Say NO to Safe Bike Access

BY DAVE CAMPBELL 
ACTION ALERT

Imagine if San Pablo Ave & 40th St looked like this:

You shouldn’t have to dodge right-turning cars on your bike commute on 40th St as you cross San Pablo Ave, and from W. MacArthur Blvd you shouldn’t have to get off your bike and walk across San Pablo Ave to get to the new bike lanes on Adeline St. Yet this is exactly what Emeryville expects you to do because their conservative city attorney [Mike Biddle] has legal concerns and their traffic engineer [Maurice Kaufman] is concerned about slowing down cars in order to make your bike commute safe. We need your help to change this.

We are asking for advance bike boxes to be reincorporated into 40th St at San Pablo and that a safe bike crossing of San Pablo at W. MacArthur be included in the project. Please contact these key Emeryville City Council members and let them know you want full bike accommodations in these two intersections.

Transportation Committee Members:

Mayor Kurt Brinkman

Councilmember Nora Davis

Other Three Council Members:

Vice Mayor Jac Asher

Councilmember Ruth Atkin

Councilmember Jennifer West

If you can attend a key meeting of the Public Works Committee on July 18, 9:00am at City Hall Garden Room, please join EBBC and Emeryville BPACmembers in pushing for a better solution that allows you to stay on your bike and avoid having to dodge cars on your bike ride to work.

We appreciate Emeryville’s willingness to stripe green bike lanes at critical points in these intersections to highlight the presence of bicyclists-it helps bike safety, but much more is needed to get you safely across busy arterial streets. Emeryville originally included advance bike boxes with right turn prohibitions at San Pablo Ave & 40th St to get you safely across San Pablo Ave without having to dodge right-turning cars, but then removed them at the insistence of the traffic engineer and city attorney. We want the bike boxes put back into the plans. This intersection has the highest volumes of bike traffic in Emeryville.

These bike boxes were proposed in Emeryville’s Safe Routes to Transit grant application for $820,000. They have been removed from the project.

Equally frustrating are suggestions that bicyclists get off their bikes and walk across San Pablo to get onto Adeline St. and its new bike lanes where W. MacArthur intersects with San Pablo Ave. There should be a direct and safe bike connection between W. MacArthur Blvd and Adeline St, across San Pablo Ave. This intersection has the 2nd highest volumes of bike traffic in Emeryville.

Imagine a traffic engineer telling a driver they need to get out of their car and walk half a block and then get back in their car to continue their commute? This is the level of inconvenience being designed into two new intersections in Emeryville for bicyclists. It’s time for you to be able to make everyday trips in Emeryville on the streets you ride, like 40th St and W. MacArthur. Contact your City Councilmember today!

View the city’s existing plans for the 40th/San Pablo and Adeline/W MacArthur/San Pablo intersections online here.

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Dave Campbell is Programs Director at the East Bay Bicycle Coalition and frequently offers his prodigious bike policy expertise at Emeryville's Bicycle Pedestrian Committee.  Founded in 1972, the East Bay Bike Coalition is the premiere bicycling advocacy organization in the East Bay.  Among their accomplishments are Bikes on BART, Bike To Work Day and passage of Measure F ($11 million for local roads and Complete Streets). The non-profit group, open to all, works for "safe, convenient and enjoyable bicycling for all people in the East Bay". 

School District Moves Against Bicycling at Center of Community Life Site

"Pimps and Drug Dealers" Will Prey On 
Our Children

No Intent to Build Required Path

The Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee ruled Monday against a plethora of high level authorities that had assembled at the City Hall meeting asking to approve a plan for bike parking at Emeryville's proposed new school and to remove a bike path adjoining the school.  After the Committee voted unanimously to require the path be built and the City Council concurred in April, the Committee was descended upon Monday by a dozen City and School District staff members and department heads.  Included in the fray was the Superintendent of the Schools, the Chief of Police, the head of the Recreation Department and the President of the School Board all pleading for the Committee reverse its earlier vote to compel the District to install the required bicycle/pedestrian path adjoining the incipient Center of Community Life.  The Committee refused Monday to reverse the earlier vote. The assembled group uniformly expressed concern that the proposed bike pedestrian path, called the ECCL Path, would attract a criminal element and that the children at the adjacent school would be imperiled.

Monday's appeal to the Bike/Ped Committee seems to represent a desire on the School District's part to get as much support as possible for not building the ECCL Path but the District indicated it has no intention of building the path in the foreseeable future regardless of the Bike/Ped Committee and the City Council vote forcing them to.  

"I'm Sorry, I Don't Have That Information" Part 2
The throng also asked the Committee members to accept a bike parking component of the Center of Community Life plan but the Committee rebuffed the proposal citing insufficient parking spaces. The plan called for 44 total bike parking spots (22 secure) for the entire Center of Community Life which will include 800 students plus teachers and staff plus the Recreation Department faculty and staff plus members of the public.

Emery schools architect Roy Miller
Again, he doesn't have the information.

The Committee attempted to determine how much bike parking would be appropriate based on how many people would be using the site on a given day, the standard metric the Committee uses as it recommends bike parking for commercial projects in town.  The School District architect, Roy Miller told stunned Committee members he had no idea how many people could be expected to be on the site leaving them unable to make an informed decision, "I'm sorry, I don't have that information" he said, in a moment of deja vu.  Mr Miller had uttered the same remark to the planning Commission and then the City Council in April about size of the existing school pool deck, as those decision making bodies attempted to determine whether to shrink the deck to make way for the ECCL Path.
After Mr Miller punted on the number of people expected at the Center of Community Life on a daily basis, the Bike/Ped Committee members determined on their own it must be more than 1000 and they called for at least 10% bike parking spots or 100 for the cramped site, a number that seemed to stun the school officials.

"Classist"

Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo
Bike/Ped paths are bad..."drastic" even 
So why are WE being picked on? It's not fair!

The meeting was punctuated with plenty of hyperbole and overblown bombast as the authorities attempted to throw their weight around and intimidate the Committee members.  Two school security personnel testified that the bike/ped path would be crawling with criminals preying on the school children, upping the ante of the previous "gang rape" rhetoric from Council member Nora Davis.  The chief of school security, Ken Wright noted thugs and criminals would use the path as an access point; "pimps and drug dealers" would be "cutting holes in the fence" to get at the children he said.  In an emotional plea, he hinted children could be "taken" and he said no one would want that on their conscience.
Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo said the bike/ped path is "drastic" and she complained that it is unfair that the neighboring private school, Escuela Bilingue Internacional (EBI) was released from a proposed path alongside that facility while the Center of Community Life is being forced to accepted its path, a double standard.  She called the April decision by the City Council allowing removal the EBI Path "classist",  owing to the advantaged private school and disadvantaged public school dynamic.

Ms Lindo and the anti-ECCL Path crew plans on taking its show on the road after the drubbing it suffered at the Bike/Ped Committee Monday.  They plan on giving the Committee a tour of the site in the near future in hopes of peeling off a majority of Committee members before appealing to the City Council at a later date.

Emeryville Wins Pedestrian/Bike Plan Award

Emeryville announces the receipt of an award of excellence from the American Planning Association (APA) for our newly enacted Pedestrian/Bicycle Plan.  The award issued May 17th is in the APA Northern Section Awards Program for 'Outstanding Planning on a Focused Issue'.  The APA notified Emeryville that the Ped/Bike Plan is also eligible for a California Chapter APA award to be decided this summer.

Award Winning!

Emeryville's Ped/Bike Plan was forged over two years with help from the Bike/Ped Committee and Alta Planning of Berkeley at a cost of some $200,000.  Professional planners have praised the new plan as forward thinking and practical, that will help to alleviate problems associated with excess vehicle traffic and make for a more livable city.  The plan earmarks certain identified streets as low volume, slow streets to help bicyclists commute along safe and direct routes.  These routes, designated as bicycle boulevards were planned with a mind to commuting between neighboring municipalities in a seamless way, something the APA noted was worthy of commendation.

Congratulations to Emeryville!

Hard Won Horton Street Bike Boulevard Victory

After 12 Years, Yellow Turns Red

After 12 years of fighting, Emeryville's Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee recently managed to convince the City Council to remove a controversial yellow parking zone on Horton Street near the Amtrak station and today the Public Works Department ceremoniously painted over the yellow curb with red paint.  Bicyclists in the bike lane will now no longer have to swerve out into the vehicle travel lane to avoid hitting commercial vehicles parked in the infamous yellow zone, blocking the bike lane.  It's been a long hard slog for bicyclists to simply convince lawmakers to remove this one dangerous parking spot and bikers tonight are celebrating.

Small Victory Anywhere Else
In any other town the simple removal of a single unsafe parking spot would hardly be a cause for celebration.  It would just be considered normal government functioning, not even newsworthy.   This isn't any other town however, this is Emeryville, and the parking spot in question wasn't just any spot, it was a spot prized by Wareham Development, the most favored developer in town.
According to rumors, Wareham Development recently told city officials they no longer objected to removing the parking spot, freeing the Council to finally placate the bicyclists.  For their part, the Council didn't explain why they changed their minds about turning the commercial parking zone into a no parking zone.
Over the years the East Bay Bicycle Coalition and the California Bicycle Coalition joined Emeryville's Bike Committee in pleading the City Council to rectify the dangerous condition.  The Bike Committee itself voted unanimously three times to get rid of the parking spot but to no avail...until now.

The yellow zone was created in 2001 by the City Council after Wareham Development asked for it as a result of their new building at 5980 Horton Street being constructed without a commercial parking area for delivery trucks.  Wareham looked instead to the City of Emeryville to provide a free on street parking spot for their tenants use.  Bicyclists in town cried foul after the City painted the curb yellow in the bike lane but for 12 years the Council showed no interest in the bicyclist's concerns.  Former City Councilman John Fricke even told his colleagues that the yellow zone in a bike lane might actually be illegal, inviting a lawsuit if a bicyclist were to be hurt as a result of swerving into the travel lane but the Council majority was unmoved and still the yellow zone remained, vexing bicyclists....a tangible metaphor for who runs this town.

As of today, all of that is now past.  A yellow zone is removed today in Emeryville...what's next?

A victory 12 years in the making!  
An unsafe bike condition is removed
on the Horton Street Bike Boulevard.

Grand Bargain Fails For Horton Street Bike Boulevard

City Hall Reneges on Bike Boulevard Deal

News Analysis
Emeryville's Transportation Committee, made up of two council members, blocked the implementation of traffic calming for the Horton Street Boulevard in January*, negating a requirement of the city's own Bike/Pedestrian Plan and welshing on a side bargain struck between City Hall and the Bicycle/Pedestrian Committee.
It's the latest salvo in a multi-year conflict over Horton Street traffic calming proposals between the Bike Committee and City Hall.  Twice before over the years, the Bike Committee unanimously voted to recommend traffic calming measures for Horton Street to increase safety for bicyclists and both times the City Council overruled the Bike Committee. This time the Bike Committee had a much stronger hand; the rule of law with the recent passage of the new Bike Plan and a grand bargain struck with City Hall involving the giving away of bike lanes in trade for implementing the traffic calming.

The blocking maneuver by the Transportation Committee was a clear violation of the requirement, spelled out in the new Bike Plan to move up a chain of increasingly vigorous traffic calming measures meant to reduce traffic volume to below 3000 vehicle trips per day (VTD).  Horton Street is now at 'Level Three' and since the traffic volume keeps increasing, it's time to move to 'Level Four'.  Level Four requires locating traffic calming devises on the street in two strategic locations spelled out in the Plan. The City Council can pick between two options:  'chicanes', a forced weaving of traffic, side to side or 'chokers', a neck down of the street to one lane over a short distance.  The Tattler reported on this requirement last fall.

The Horton Street grand bargain is an agreement the Bike Committee made with the Council last fall to try to force Level Four traffic calming.  The Bike Committee agreed to allow the removal of bike lanes required by the Bike Plan for Horton Street in trade for City Hall not obstructing the Plan's requirement to install the Level Four traffic calming measures.  A sort of extra kick in the pants.

The Background:
Traffic Calming
Horton Street has been a very contentious thoroughfare as it turns out.  Automobile interests have been vying for increased use of Horton, prompting the City Council to widen the street.  One developer in particular, Wareham Development, told the Council that the street should not even have bikes on it at all.
The Bike Committee recognized Horton Street to be the best option for bicyclists traveling north/south through Emeryville and they sought to increase bike safety by getting bike lanes requirements into the previous Bike Plan, as a place of refuge on the increasingly dangerous street.  The City went on to paint most of the required the bike lanes on the street, skipping the area from 45th Street south to the Oakland border.  The Bike Committee also suggested that the City Council install a choker on the street to make it more bike friendly, an option on which the Council voted NO.

The problems arose later when City Hall, under pressure from the Bike Committee declared Horton Street to be a 'Bike Boulevard', or a bicycle preferred street, strongly suggesting that traffic volumes should be lowered.  Again the Bike Committee implored the Council to install a choker on the street but they were rebuffed by the Council.
This was further exacerbated after the Council signed the new Bike Plan into law last fall.  With its program of increasingly rigorous traffic calming levels and its strict time lines to accomplish it, the Bike Plan has ostensibly tied the Council's hands, forcing traffic levels to stay below 3000 VTD.
Of course a law is only relevant if there is political will to enforce it, a fact not lost on Wareham.  With its many buildings on or near Horton Street and its most favored developer status at City Hall, Wareham intervened and told the Council they don't approve of traffic calming past Level Three for Horton Street.

The Grand Bargain
City Hall has been positioning itself to increase vehicle traffic on Horton Street even as the Council voted to implement bike boulevard status for the street and the Bike Plan with its necessity for fewer cars.  There has been much pressure on the south end of Horton Street to maximize the street for cars there.  The City physically widened the street in anticipation of adding another lane of traffic south of Park Avenue, a move not yet made.  The City Manager is trying to create a place holder with the street widening to accommodate the anticipated gush of cars when the Sherwin Williams site gets developed, a position he expressed publicly.
But the most pressure has come to bear on the Bike Committee to give up the required bike lanes on the section of the street north of Park Avenue to 45th Street, to allow for more parking for Peet's Coffee and other businesses there.  Some have postulated that the parking there is temporary, also meant to serve as a place holder to allow an extra travel lane to be added for the future Sherwin Williams project.

Ever since the Bike Committee wrote bike lanes for Horton Street into the first Bike Plan in 1998, the lanes were meant to serve as a bargaining chip to be given away only with assurances for real traffic calming to reduce traffic volumes.  The Committee discussed at length how the most preferable option would be to have no bike lanes, but only if Horton Street had far fewer cars; a condition that could only be had with traffic calming such as a choker or traffic diverter.
Finally, the Bike Committee did relent and gave away the bike lanes on this section of Horton Street and the vote included the provisions that the Bike Plan be obeyed and the proper traffic calming delivered.  The idea is that the bike lanes would go but Horton Street would get Level Four traffic calming.  The elimination of bike lanes on Bicycle Boulevards without traffic calming represents a scam perpetrated by City Hall documented by the Tattler.
The Transportation Committee vote to block Level Four traffic calming in January* is a City Hall welshing of the grand bargain.

* Correction: previously the Tattler reported the Transportation Committee meeting happened last week. Council member and Transportation Committee member Jennifer West instructs us that the meeting where they blocked the traffic calming actually was in January.

Will Emeryville's New Bike Plan Be Ignored?

Major Traffic Calming Long Past Due For Horton Street

Opinion
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 'neckdown'
called for by level 4 traffic calming.

The prescibed 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- wayfinding signs, reduced delays at intersections

Level 3 Limited Traffic Calming- intersection bulbouts

Level 4 Significant Traffic Calming- neckdowns

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.