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. |
NACTO is a nation wide non-profit organization comprised of transportation experts who use consensus safety best practices to come up with their guidelines. They don't offer rules for cities to follow, just guidelines. However Emeryville would be nuts to abandon NACTO for its bike plan. Safety should be up to experts in the field, not unqualified city staff members.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why you would lie about Kalimah's abilities, he is a very capable man who knows how to drive and still has a driver's license. He drove all the time when he studied at Cal and he still can. He promised to fight the YIMBY bike lobby that is making it harder to drive on our streets, I hope he can correct you for your misinformation.
ReplyDeleteI got the information that Council member Priforce does not own a car and has never had a driver's license directly from Mr Priforce himself. There is no lying going on but you are misinformed about this.
DeleteWhat is the "YIMBY bike lobby"? I've never heard of that. Please inform.
DeleteThe Priforce trolls continue on here. They don't know when to stop. But the Tattler is just as bad. Every story somehow includes Priforce (click bait) and Bauters. That man lives rent free in your head Tattler. He's gone. Get over the hatred. The Tattler brings out the worst in everybody. Please go back to reporting on the news we need to know, not your opinions. I know, not as many clicks.
ReplyDeleteJust so everyone knows, the Tattler (and therefore I) get no money for all the efforts here. The "click bait" notion is a ruse. I don't care how many people read Tattler stories except for the fact that I have a personal preference for democracy and my preference to see people be informed in a democracy. See how removed that is from the world of commercialism? To your point: former mayor John Bauters is gone, yes, but his shadow is long over our City Hall. The polity here is still 'Bautersian'. Like a zombie, he continues to stalk the City Council chamber. Over time, I have to assume his influence will fade but until then, we continue to report on the news at City Hall as the citizens need and deserve to know.
DeleteAn entire story about Matthew Solomon and you make it about Kalimah Priforce. Sounds like a YOU problem.
DeleteThanks everyone for flagging this comment. As many of you know, my policy is not to engage with anonymous posts since research has shown that many are generated by bots. Instead, I’ll respond to the editor’s remarks directly.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the editor clarifying that they did in fact reach out to me about this story and confirmed that I do not drive, have never had a driver’s license (though I hope to attain one), and therefore could not have been "during all the time" as the anonymous poster suggested. I grew up in Brooklyn, where it’s common for people to never drive at all.
From time to time, I do take Uber or Lyft rides, but that requires little more than opening an app - hardly a skill set that’s relevant to the claim being made.
Finally, I have never pledged to “take on” any so-called bike lobby. What I have pledged is to defend our democracy against enemies foreign and domestic. That means I oppose false divisions like YIMBY vs. NIMBY and focus instead on the real threat: groups using dark money to weaken our democratic institutions.
Hope that clears things up.
—Kalimah
Thank you for your hard work Councilmember. You are the only one that understands that bike lanes are gentrification that will bring high rent and the homeless to our neighborhood. We appreciate you fighting against the cities misguided plan to put bikes on every street including 40th, when not everyone is able to ride a bike.
DeleteThink he made it very clear that he isn't against a bike lobby or bike lanes. He's against dark money. I'm guessing if a bike lane is needed and didn't involve dark money, he wouldn't be opposed to it. Sadly, that's not Emeryville's history
DeleteTo the 1:44 commenter- FYI The City of Emeryville has no plan to 'put' bikes on any street. They have a mandate and a duty to allow bikes on every street. All legal modes of transportation are allowed on every street (and public easement).
DeleteI think the original bike study:
ReplyDelete1. Failed to address with the fact that there are people that dont use bikes.
2. The rules in using these paths are a result the lack of enforcement and forcing travel patterns / behaviors to be compromised.
3. Paths already look crappy due to lack of maintenance.
What is "the original bike study"? Can you direct us to that so we can check? Are you talking about Emeryville's first Bike Plan?
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ReplyDelete🚮 A brilliant comment with so much meaning! This suggests Mr. Solomon is in favor of using trash recepticles, which any citizen can support. Thank you for sharing.
DeleteThis story is a lie. I know Matthew Solomon and he doesn’t believe any of what you say he does. He loves biking and he wants to see it expand. He supports NACTO and he would never propose it be taken out of our bike plan.
ReplyDeleteEverything reported on in this story is from a telephone interview with Council member Solomon. The call was not recorded (illegal in California) but the Tattler has extemporaneous notes from the call. The easiest thing in the world is for a politician or sycophant is to deny they said something that was not recorded. While this tactic should be beneath Mr Solomon (and it may indeed be), his views on this matter will be revealed in his adoption of or failure to adopt public policy that would tend to support the claims in the story.
DeleteIf the Council member is indeed against removing NACTO from the bike plan as you say, that will be revealed by him letting the constituents know either actively or inactively. Active would be to submit a My Turn Tattler piece or on camera at the Council chamber or in a press release or conference. Inactive would be how he comports himself on the Council vis a vis voting to count the number of vehicles on our bike boulevards and then how he votes regarding ameliorating the negative effects of too much traffic on the bike boulevards. If he doesn’t bring forward a Council vote on vehicle counts and then vote to mollify the negative effects like NACTO delineates, then we will know Council member Solomon is not interested in this. Look to the Tattler to highlight this Council member’s activity (or lack of activity) on our bike boulevards moving forward.
This story contains a lot of intra-personal information that’s not of interest to people outside of Emeryville but there’s a recognition that is relevant for everyone in the greater community. And that is the connection local governments have with NACTO. I know enough about NACTO to state that nobody in government should be looking to cut them out of bicycle or pedestrian official policy. They work to assure safety yes but also universality between local governments which the story did not report on. With universality comes better understanding and increased safety. Nobody should have to know and learn different bike standards when traveling between different cities in the Bay Area. There should be one standard and that standard is NACTO. If Emeryville abandons NACTO, it will lead to confusion and ultimately less safety for bikers. Please stand by NACTO Emeryville
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