G’Day mate! How you going!?

This is the typical Australian greeting, one that I had the pleasure of hearing for the past week. I was part of a 15-person delegation from San Jose to Melbourne, selected and sponsored by Knight Foundation and organized through 8-80 Cities.

Knight Foundation hosts a study trip once a year for leaders in San Jose as a part of the Foundation’s commitment to build community through community engagement. Other cities that have been visited include Guadalajara to learn about their open

streets programs, and Copenhagen to learn about their biketopia.

When I heard the choice was Melbourne, my curiosity was peaked. As explained to the delegation by Chris Thompson, Knight’s San Jose point person, Melbourne and San Jose have much in common and as a result, much to learn from each other.

He was right.

At times, I felt I was listening to San Jose’s history as their planners described things like the development of their Downtown. For them, greater Melbourne had been like a donut, the city center being the hole. Today it is a bustling metropolis, the looks of which reminded me of Chicago. It has interesting architecture, small retail establishments that are thriving, street art galore and a population density that is able to make all this possible.

Today, their city center is incredible. But only a short time ago, it was nothing. That nothing was transformed through jobs and housing, the same kind of transformation San Jose is experiencing. Melbourne, like San Jose, focused on job attraction and was successful but what they lacked was housing. In 1985 their city center had 700 homes. Today it is closer to 42,000, starting with the repurposing of old office buildings into housing and supplemented by new highrises. Dense housing was the key element that transformed their city.

The focus of the trip was culture, place, and transportation. Of course, I was interested in learning about the bike infrastructure in addition to the transportation network. Here’s what I learned.

First, their transit system is great. It’s crowded and free in the core, what they call the Central Business District (CBD.) And here’s what was missing – Scooters. Coming from San Jose where scooters are everywhere, the lack of scooters was obvious. We all wondered why.

The top reason is because scooters are not allowed. But one also can’t help but wonder if scooters would be silly in an area with stellar transit. Their sidewalks are packed with people. The bike network is sparse and stressful. Their transit is good and free (in the CBD). Therefore, the need for a device that can accommodate short hops is less compelling, perhaps?

When it comes to the Melbourne bike network I would rate is as decent. There are 4-6 main, separated trails that act as magnets for bike commuters. During commute times, those trails were like a highway of bicyclists, clearly viewed as safe, quick, efficient corridors that bicyclists gravitate towards, much like the Guadalupe Trail to jobs in North San Jose.

The on-street network was less developed and is a work in progress. There are some protected bike lanes but not very many. The rest of the network includes average sized bike lanes, some with green paint. For the most part, I observed many fearless bicyclists taking the lane at high speeds. I consider myself somewhat fearless on a bike but watching them made me cringe and reinforced the fact that if we want more than a small percentage of the population to take up bicycling for every day use, we have to create safe and stress free experiences through wide, buffered and protected bike lanes that are not mixed with high speed traffic. This is where San Jose is leading. Through the Better Bikeways Network connected to the Guadalupe Trail, San Jose has put the infrastructure bones in place to create a great city for people who bike.

Where Melbourne excelled was their commitment to sustainability. This was most apparent in their aggressive initiatives to do one of the hardest things in the entire world – reclaim street space for parks, pedalers, and pedestrians. The City of Melbourne knows that 80% of their land is for cars in the form of streets and parking. They view this as wrong. It is wrong in that it limits the open spaces available for people to enjoy the outdoors and from an environmental perspective, it contributes to a big problem for them, heat islands. Apparently Melbourne gets hot.

So, the City has embarked on a program to identify streets and parking lots that they can reclaim for people to walk, bike and enjoy the outdoors. In one area, they closed the street down completely and converted it into sidewalk cafes. In another, they reduced street width and expanded an existing park. At one point, we watched a worker arrive in a truck, put up posts to shut down the street and drive off. We were told that every day between 10am and 4pm the street gets closed, temporarily. All of this involves taking space from cars, one of the hardest things to do.

Could we do that here in Silicon Valley? Are there particular streets that are too wide that we could reimagine to include more park, bike and walk space?

One of the reasons Knight sponsors these trips is to inspire community and city leaders to bring lessons back to their jurisdictions. Viva Calle and the Better Bikeways Network are direct results of trips to Guadalajara and Copenhagen. In this case, on the last day, I sat down with the transportation cohort and we talked about what we could bring back.

We were intrigued by all the efforts to reclaim street space. The San Jose context is a little different however in that we have more than bikes. We have all sorts of other tiny transportation devices that have begun crowding (this is a good problem!) the bike lanes and the sidewalks. So, what if we piloted a micromobility lane. Yes, a whole lane, like 11 feet at least for bikes, scooters, hover boards, skateboards… With that in mind, we started thinking about where we might do this which quickly lead us to think about one of the City’s priority bike corridors, San Fernando.

San Fernando is already a bike commute corridor, intentionally built out that way by the City and is quickly becoming a magnet for bicyclists and others.

Fortunately, the City of San Jose has been thinking along these lines and has secured a grant to enhance the existing Better Bikeways project on San Fernando with things like more permanent and aesthetically pleasing design treatments along with signaling that gives preference to bikes. With these pieces already in place, contemplating San Fernando as a place to pilot a micromobility lane is very doable.

It was ideas such as this and more that were sparked by this trip. Thank you to the Knight Foundation for continuing to invest in the nonprofit leaders of San Jose so that we can take lessons learned from other cities, the relationships made through learning together, and build a better city in San Jose and beyond.

If you’re interested in finding out about the other organizations that participated in the trip, they are below.

CreaTV, School of Arts and Culture, African American Community Service Agency, Chopsticks Alley, the City of San Jose Department of Transportation, the City of San Jose Parks, Rec and Neighborhood Services Department, the Office of Mayor Sam Liccardo, San Jose Downtown Association, City of San Jose Office of Economic Development, Guadalupe River Gardens Park Conservancy, San Jose Parks Advocates, Walk San Jose, and SPUR.