The city of San Jose Department of Transportation invites the public to their plans for new bike lanes and other work for White Road, from McKee Road to Ocala Avenue in the east side of San Jose.
This meeting takes place Thursday Wednesday, February 18th, from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm at the Alum Rock Youth Center, 137 N. White Road, San Jose, CA.
At previous bike project meetings, east siders have shown strong and consistent support for additional bike projects. This project falls firmly within City Council District 5, represented by the recently elected Magdalena Carrasco. Council Member Pierluigi Oliviero of District 6 was absolutely hammered with complaints about the proposed bikeway for Park Avenue through his district from bikeway opponents. Please be sure to let Carrasco know what you think of the plans for White Road.
Spend all the money on bike (hell, any) infrastructure on the east side of town. Maybe a couple years of neglect thanks to loud NIMBYs will make other people rise up against the loud complainers in the well-to-do ‘hoods.
The date is Wednesday the 18th, not Thursday. Oops.
Based on what happened in previous meetings, I would recommend they have two separate meetings, one to discuss the details of the new infrastructure, and a separate meeting for just parking. Having the whole meeting degenerate into bickering about parking is really unconstructive and squeezes out the discussion about the real issues. For Park they just ended up creating a separate meeting for parking anyway, so just create one from the beginning so that we don’t end up with two full meetings dominated by parking ugliness.
For a parking meeting, it would be nice if SVBC put together a powerpoint that points out and gives some examples of the well known benefits to local businesses and residents (increased business, higher property values, etc). They can get existing ppt examples from other advocacy groups, and the presentation could be recycled many times over. There is definitely a lack of public education on this matter. Good thing is that there is not that much existing street parking on White.
For the real meeting, it should focus on a true design review. The devil is in the details. For example, in general…
(1) Are there going to be protected sections, or all just unprotected? I don’t think unprotected or unbuffered lanes down White will appeal that much to the ‘interested but concerned’ and certainly would not be 8 to 80. If its going to be all unprotected, DOT should show data proving this will result in target levels of mode share in the general plan. Even though its a pseudoscience, predictions should still be data and model driven, and should compare protected vs unprotected.
(2) Will the bike lane use the gutter pan for its width calculation. The gutter pan is not legally the ‘traveled way’ and many people don’t feel comfortable riding on a seem.
(3) Will there be door zone bike lanes, and if so, how much room will be left in the lane if someone suddenly opens a typical or worst case two door coupe. Please lets see the actual calculations.
(4) Will there be simultaneous installation of bike detectors for the traffic lights, that will detect bikes “in the bike lane”, or will they require the cyclist to merge over into the middle of the traffic lane in order to trigger those small Caltrans spec induction loops. DOT spent ~1.4 million to test various methods for bike detection, concluded that IR was the best, wrote it into their official design guide, and then proceeded to install the old Caltrans style ones that don’t detect bikes in bike lanes and require you to merge each time into the traffic lane even if you are going straight (thus defeating the purpose of having a bike lane).
(5) Will the bike lane abandon you at every side street intersection, when you need it the most (where up to 75% of collision occur), or will it be dashed through to validate the mixing zone as DOT proposed on one west side bike lane (obviously allowed then), and like other cities are now doing.
(6) Will there be any traffic calming infrastructure installed at the same time. Speed ‘humps’ for example can be tuned to be almost unnoticeable at the posted 35mph limit, but harsh at typical east SJ drag racing speeds. Or can the speed limit be reduced to 30mph and flashing speed detectors installed.
(7) Will the city install bike staple racks on the street at appropriate locations.
Please DOT, present a design review with a thorough and thoughtful analysis of how you are going to apply complete streets principles to increase mode share and lower VMT as per the cities plan. Please not just pretty pictures of bike lanes. Your audience consists of mostly educated professionals.