Come along on a virtual "infrastructure ride"

On a regular basis, SVBC organizes what we call infrastructure rides. It's quite a mouthful so if you're a marketing guru who can come up with a better name, send it our way.

Infrastructure rides take public officials, city staff and advocates out to learn about street design by bike. SVBC held 13 rides in 2019/2020, all with the goal of helping city staff and elected officials understand how to plan, fund and build great bike infrastructure.

This year, SVBC was forced to finish the infrastructure rides online due to COVID. We knew the experience wouldn't be the same but the online rides turned out to be pretty darned good.Below is the recap of one of SVBC's great volunteers, Matthew Bartlett. Matt is a true bike believer and hauls everything on his bike. He and I talked after he participated in one of these infrastructure rides and I told him he should write up his experience. Why? I personally love hearing about people's "a ha" moments or the things they learn. When it comes to bike projects, it's always great to hear people realize that this stuff isn't easy. There's a whole lot of thought that goes into where those stripes get painted so that they cause us all to behave certain ways.I hope you enjoy his musings and learnings and please consider yourself invited to future rides.By Matthew Bartlett

The inimitable Shiloh Ballard extended an invitation to me to go on/attend an Infrastructure Ride with the City of San Jose’s Department of Transportation, led/hosted by Peter Bennet; It was a video conference call on Oct. 1st and I didn't know what to expect...

The location of the ride is unimportant, considering the number of projects that the City of San Jose is working on.  What’s more important for me was to understand what is involved in putting a project together, how much thought goes into it, and how it is accomplished.

First, for not being there in reality, this was just as good.  The photos that were taken of the projects were the same and maybe better than being there, because they were taken with perspective and scope in mind.  In addition there were the proposed improvement mock-ups to show what the project was to achieve, and how traffic (people, bikes, cars) would proceed through and use the new infrastructure.  These could not have been easier to understand or visualize.  An important conclusion that I had after each project was presented was ‘this is the obvious right solution’. For some of the projects, I had no idea what the solution should be before seeing it.  It was very obvious that the SJ DOT did a lot of work on each of these, and they know how to implement meaningful solutions.

If you just think about it a little bit, if you wanted to change the way traffic moves down a street, through a neighborhood, or over an overpass, there a many things to consider.  And likely multiple departments involved that might have conflicting priorities.  SJ DOT seemed to have balanced all of those quite well to come up with solutions. One example was a bike lane separated from car traffic with a concrete island that is just installed on top of existing asphalt, with art incorporated into the poured concrete at places.  I was very impressed with this project because it didn’t just do the minimum, they decided they could make it even better by making it interesting and attractive.

Another project was to re-stripe major portions of 10th and 11th streets downtown, but instead of just re-striping, it was going to be done to separate the bike lane and make it safer.  It wasn’t exactly a giant change (more of looking at it in a new way), but the change would have a giant impact on the safety of the riders of this corridor.  I used to live off of 12th street before a bike lane was ever added to either street and it could not have been a more dangerous route to take.

So after hearing about all these projects it was obvious how much work SJ DOT had to do to come up with these really thoughtful and great solutions.  It really made me happy to know that riding here was only going to get better as time went on.