May 23, 200810 Comments on Santa Cruz fire evacuations
Several hundred people living in the Santa Cruz Mountains have been forced to evacuate their homes as over 3,000 acres of dry woodland burned overnight. It’s good see people are leaving their homes with the things that are important to them.
Photo from the San Jose Mercury News.
All the smoke in the air made riding my bike this morning a little tough. I went slow to keep myself from breathing hard.
May 22, 200812 Comments on Santa Cruz approves "Bikes In Lane" signs for Mission Street
In a meeting last week, the Santa Cruz City Council unanimously voted to request “Bikes In Lane” signs to be installed on Mission Street, where two cyclists were killed by passing traffic over the past eight months.
Local cycling advocates, traffic engineers, and officials agree that Mission Street is too narrow to share safely, especially with the heavy truck traffic that travels down the road. The city’s hands are tied, however, because Mission Street is California State Highway 1 and is under the jurisdiction of Caltrans District 5. Caltrans originally refused to install anything besides “Share the Road” signs, but after People Power Santa Cruz asked for state Assembly Member John Laird’s assistance, Caltrans relented and agreed to install signage that the city of Santa Cruz considers more effective.
At the meeting, the decision to make was between three different signs: an advisory “Bicycles May Use Full Lane” sign that’s becoming more common in California, a yellow “Watch for Bicycles Using Lane” sign proposed by Caltrans, and the “Bikes In Lane” sign that was approved by the council. The Santa Cruz police department opposed the “May Use Full Lane” sign but supported the “Bikes In Lane” sign.
Bill of Boston rides his heavily laden bicycle down the middle of the lane on Mission Street in Santa Cruz, California. One citizen at the council meeting said cyclists should use the sidewalk. Riding on the sidewalk, however, does nothing to protect cyclists from right hook collisions.
Several traffic engineering experts explained how to improve the safety of bicycling on Mission Street. John Ciccarelli of the Bicycle Technical Committee of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices explained that the “Bicycles May Use Full Lane” will likely be in the 2009 edition of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices published by the Federal Highway Adminstration. The MUTCD is the standard used by all U.S. transportation departments for their road signs — it’s the reason all stop signs in the United States are red octagons with white letters with a standard size and standard height.
Santa Cruz police chief Howard Skerry said they may ticket cyclists who in their view impeded traffic, regardless of any signage installed by the city. If bicyclists did not agree with that interpretation, he invited them to let the courts decide the matter.
Bob Shanteau spoke after the CHP and noted that the California Vehicle Code for impeding traffic only applies to 2 lane roads, not 4 lane highways such as Mission Street. “As long as the lane was too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to share side by side,’ says Shanteau, “then the bicyclist was allowed to take the full lane.”
“People have been taught since childhood to stay out of the way of cars, and that two bicyclists in Santa Cruz had followed that advice and they were both now dead. We need to make sure that never happens again,” Shanteau continue as people in the council chambers applauded him.
While the engineers and advocates wanted the Bikes May Use Full Lane signs, the city voted for the “Bikes In Lane” sign instead. People Power Director Micah Posner said, “In the end not that much different. Having the sign will really improve the campaign to encourage awareness. It’s about informing cyclist and motorist and it’s about cyclists asserting their rights. These signs will be a big step forward.”
Posner expressed some exasperation about the police department’s threat to ticket cyclists who “impede” traffic. People Power has already gone to court on behalf of ticketed cyclists and “we beat it in court based on California Vehicle Code.”
Caltrans still must get approval for the proposed sign from the California Traffic Control Device Committee, which meets next week. Because the city of Santa Cruz endorsed the untested “Bikes In Lane” sign over the standard “May Use Full Lane” sign, state approval is uncertain. The city council approved the Bikes In Lane sign thinking that Caltrans could get them installed this summer, but their selection of a non-standard sign will possibly mean a delay until this fall at the very earliest.
More:
Thank you to Micah Posner and Bob Shantaeu for the details.
May 17, 20084 Comments on San Lorenzo Valley Critical Mass
Over 500 cyclists participated in the 4th Annual Rail and Trail Day on Saturday, May 17 2008 to celebrate rail and bike travel and support local efforts to create a 31 mile trail along the Union Pacific rail corridor that runs along the Santa Cruz coast from Davenport to Watsonville, California.
The cyclists met at Santa Cruz Depot where they loaded bikes, trailers, and other gear onto a train chartered from the Roaring Camp Railroad. Adults and children had fun as they talked and shared snacks on the ride up the San Lorenzo Valley through redwood groves to the Roaring Camp depot near Felton. After they got off the train and unloaded their bikes, they cut over to the Henry Cowell State Forest visitor center parking lot and lined up for the ride down Highway 9 from Felton back to Santa Cruz.
The purpose of the ride is the drum up support for a proposed rail trail along the Santa Cruz Coast. The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Agency has agreed to purchase the rail right of way from Union Pacific, but funding is not available. According to Friends of the Rail Trail (FORT), the county can use Proposition 116 funds, and to get those funds the county must implement public transportation service along the corridor. Ride organizers encouraged participants to contact the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission to express their support for the coast railroad acquisition.
Micah Posner, director of the bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group People Power Santa Cruz, joked that there wouldn’t be a “5th Annual Rail Trail Day because we’ll have our trail by then!”
My children and I had a great time on this ride and we topped it off with a visit to Marianne’s Ice Cream on Ocean Street afterwards. Yum!
February 4, 200810 Comments on Crazy bus passenger
A whacked out bus passenger on the 91 commuter express between Watsonville and Santa Cruz, CA grabbed the bus steering wheel and crashed the bus into the adjacent hillside in Santa Cruz County.
The unnamed passenger saw his girlfriend’s car in — get this — a suspected DUI accident on the side of Highway 1 south of Santa Cruz. He demanded to be let off immediately, but when the bus driver told the passenger he would be let off at the next exit, the passenger grabbed the steering wheel and steered the bus into the hill. The passenger was arrested almost immediately, I’d guess by law enforcement officers who were already at the scene of the earlier accident. What a piece of work. Read more in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
I had a nice quiet ride home on my commuter bus this evening 🙂
January 4, 200810 Comments on Windy in Santa Cruz, Bay Area
The moderate rain is causing some local flooding, but the wind is causing some real problems. The announcer during the radio traffic report marveled at the almost complete absence of bicyclists in San Francisco this morning while she reported which SF Muni lines are closed because of weather. The ferries also aren’t running today. 40 mph winds in some areas gusting to 100 mph might have something to do with that.
There are tree branches and palm tree husks all over the roads. Here’s a photo from Santa Cruz this morning.
Coastal flooding, power outages, overturned trucks, bridge and road closures, transit shutdowns and fallen trees are making things a little more challenging than usual. If you’re out in this on a bike, avoid the power lines; they hurt. Flying twigs in the face hurt too.
January 3, 200811 Comments on Santa Cruz short bar green fixie
I’m pretty sure I saw the fixed gear bike described here just a couple of weeks ago. I might even have a photo of this bike around somewhere.
The bike is a silver and green road bike with short handle bars and no brakes with black tires and green rims. The main bar is wrapped with green and black checkered material.
This is from a news report of a cyclist death. It was a hit-and-run — a FedEx driver apparently hooked the cyclist and possibly didn’t even know about the collision.
Update: The kid who died was a student at San Francisco State, home with his parents over the holidays. Lucian Gregg was apparently going downhill on his brakeless fixie when he struck the FedEx truck. What a shame. East Cliff Drive at the site of the collision is fairly steep and narrow; a sign is posted along this section of East Cliff Drive for cyclists to take the lane.
