6th Annual Bike Summit 2016 Recap

Thank you to all who attended the 6th Annual Silicon Valley Bike Summit! Did you miss it? Read on to catch up on all the day’s fascinating discussions. You can also view the archive of all tweets from the Summit and check out the photos from the day on Facebook.The Summit was a great day of learning about safety and active transportation in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties and we enjoyed seeing people from the non-profit, private, and public sectors, as well as local residents and advocates! You can find links to each presentation by clicking on the presenter's name.A huge thanks to Microsoft Silicon Valley for hosting and providing food and beverages – the day would have been impossible without their help. We would also like to express our gratitude to AT&T, City of Cupertino, Dero, Emison Hullverson LLC/BicycleLaw.com, Gary Brustin, Moved by Bikes, Paoli & Geerhart LLP, Spare the Air Santa Clara County Resource Team, Social Bicycles, and Zagster. Also thank you to Clif Bar for the snacks and Cindy Ras Creative for the graphic design.Cheers to our dedicated staff and volunteers, we couldn’t do it without you! This year, we had a large Bikepool from Mountain View Caltrain, with about 30 participants, led by our friends at Alta Planning & Design. We also offered bike valet, with a record 90 bikes parked (almost half of attendees)!Due to an injury, our scheduled keynote, Kate White, Deputy Secretary of Environmental Policy and Housing Coordination at the California State Transportation Agency, was unable to attend. In her place, we were fortunate enough to snag Dave Snyder, Executive Director of the California Bicycle Coalition. Dave discussed the legislative work of CalBike and how they are working with Caltrans and elected officials to make our roads friendlier for bikes!Next, a panel of Caltrans representatives spoke on the various rules, regulations, and guidelines that govern bicycle facility design in California. A lot has changed in the past couple of years, including a new goal to triple bicycling by 2020. Illuminating the details were Rachel Carpenter, Pedestrian & Bicycle Safety Branch in Traffic Operations; Robert Effinger, Project Delivery Coordinator; and Sergio Ruiz, Bike/Ped Coordinator for District 4.In the afternoon, we heard case studies from the Cities of Menlo Park and Davis on protected bike lanes and protected intersections. Davis has the highest bike mode share in the country (20%) while Menlo Park has the third highest in the Bay Area (8%), behind Berkeley and Palo Alto. Menlo Park Transportation Manager Nikki Nagaya and Rayna deNiord of CMG Architecture discussed the Chilco Street two-way protected bikeway, a public-private partnership with Facebook. Davis’ Bike/Ped Coordinator Jennifer Donofrio and consultant Adrian Engel of Fehr + Peers discussed the state’s first protected intersection and the lessons learned since the project was built. Opening the session, Sean Co of Toole Design Group went over the MassDOT Seperated Bike Lane Planning and Design Guide to introduce the details of these types of projects.Building off the debut of our Vision Zero Toolkit (available for free download) at last year’s Summit, we welcomed a panel focused on the progress of Vision Zero San Jose. We heard from Laura Wells in the city’s transportation department, Lt. Steven Payne from traffic enforcement, and our non-profit partner Jaime Fearer at California Walks about how the city is implementing Vision Zero goals throughout the city. Our moderator, Jessica Garner from San Mateo County Health System, put these lessons in context for smaller cities up and down the Peninsula.For the first time, we used the Summit as an occasion to award people and projects that support SVBC’s vision of a community that values, includes, and encourages bicycling for all purposes for all people. Nominations were open from May through July and anyone could submit a nomination. The winners were:

• Infrastructure Project of the Year: Resurfacing of the Bay Trail from Mountain View to Sunnyvale. Recipients: Google and The San Francisco Bay Trail.
• Non-Infrastructure Project of the Year: San Jose Bike Party.
• Public Official of the Year: Teresa O’Neill, Vice Mayor of Santa Clara.

Our final session focused on how individuals and cities are powering pilot projects to make bicycling more attractive and fun. Elaine Uang of Palo Alto Forward brought it all together as the moderator. Cherie Walkowiak from Safe Mountain View discussed how advocates can implement their own pop-up bike lane or park projects to encourage their city to make changes. On the public side of things, Joshuah Mello of City of Palo Alto and consultant Ryan McClain of Fehr + Peers detailed how cities are using pop-ups as a tool for feedback and testing. Then Kathy Kleinbaum of City of San Mateo discussed their new bike share pilot program, Bay Bikes, which is different from Bay Area Bike Share and is providing a new model for smaller suburbs.We really appreciated the thoughtful questions from the audience for each panel. We will be asking the panelists to answer some of the questions that there wasn’t time to answer during the day – stay tuned for future blog posts with their answers!We hope that you were inspired by all that you heard. Do you have a new idea that you want to work on this year? Let us know in the comments. Hope to see you next year!