Better Bikeways

Our goal:  Approve for use in California safer and more protected bikeway designs so that everyone, from the 8-year old child to the 80-year old grandmother, can enjoy bicycling on facilities largely protected from car traffic.

The problem

Right now, many of the bikeway designs that provide the most protection from car traffic are not approved for use in California. California leads the country in our ambition to tackle global warming, but our Transportation Department is far behind their peers in encouraging the roadway design necessary to increase bicycling and reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, Chicago plans to build as many as 100 miles of protected bikeways by 2015, and Portland and New York and Seattle are joining them in building the bicycle networks that are necessary to help everyone from the age of 8 to 80 feel safe riding bicycles.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) provides the Urban Bikeway Design Guide and U.S. D.O.T. Secretary Ray LaHood encourage these newer, safer designs, but traffic law restricts local agencies to just Caltrans’ out-of-date designs.

Paradoxically, state law is considerably more liberal when it comes to local streets and roads; the HDM is just one of the several design standards and guides that cities and counties may follow in creating their roadway networks. Why is state law so restrictive when it comes to bikeways?

The solution

With leadership from  Fremont Assemblymember Bob Wieckowski, we introduced AB 819 to permit cities to use the NACTO’s’ Urban Bikeway Design Guide, but the bill got amended to merely require Caltrans to implement an experimental process to evaluate bikeway designs. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty is ardently committed to sustainable transportation and willing to put some attention into updating Caltrans’ standards, after thorough evaluation. Our challenge is to ensure that experimentation process is as quick as it is thorough, so that California’s communities can catch up to the rest of the country in retrofitting our streets to make them safe and attractive to every potential bicycle rider, from 8 to 80 years old.

What you can do

Caltrans needs to hear from California’s local leaders that they need the freedom to build modern, safe bikeways.

1. Please send this letter to Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty, and send a copy to Governor Brown and to us.

2. Join the Calbike Better Bikeways campaign mailing list by clicking here.

Past efforts

Impediments to better bikeway designs are a big problem in California. Last year, the California Bicycle Coalition took a big step in the campaign to permit better bicycle infrastructure with our victorious effort to put two representatives of the nonmotorized community on the California Traffic Control Devices Committee.