San Mateo - Authorize North Central Bike Lanes - Monday at 7 pm

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Oct 1

This guest blog is written by Raayan Mohtashemi, SVBC member and San Mateo Local Team member.

At San Mateo’s upcoming City Council Meeting (Monday, October 4th at 7 PM), staff will recommend the council authorize a contract to move ahead on a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)-funded project to rehabilitate pavement and implement planned bicycle facilities on Humboldt Street, Poplar Avenue, and Indian Avenue in the North Central neighborhood. We agree with the staff recommendation and ask for the contract to be awarded and for all proposed bike facilities to be authorized! The project will install bike lanes on Humboldt Street and Poplar Avenue, two important neighborhood connections, and bicycle boulevard improvements on Indian Avenue. The projects will calm traffic next to College Park Elementary School and provide sorely needed safer spaces for bikes to navigate the neighborhood.

Take Action

Attend the City Council meeting: Monday, Oct. 4 at 7 pm – Agenda with Link to join via Zoom (Item 13) – and make a public comment in favor of bike lanes on Humboldt Street, Poplar Avenue, and Indian Avenue in the North Central neighborhood
Email City Council in favor of this contract before Monday’s meeting: citycouncil@cityofsanmateo.org and cc mraayan65@gmail.com
Use the background info below to prepare your talking points or email – remember to include how these projects would make a difference to you.

Background

According to staff, North Central has some of the highest bicycle rates in the city, and Humboldt Street has a high rate of vehicle collisions. Just last week, a woman was killed in a terrible fatal crash on Humboldt Street and West Santa Inez, within the project area. Earlier in the year, a 68-year-old man biking on Humboldt was seriously injured in a hit-and-run crash. How can we say that we are doing enough to encourage sustainable transportation when Humboldt Street has seen multiple collisions, including a fatal one, in the past year? Even despite the unsafe nature of street design in North Central, many people still bike on Humboldt. Cyclists routinely choose to ride on the sidewalk because of how unsafe the street is, which leads to its own safety concerns with conflicts between pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers pulling into and out of the numerous driveways on the street. Bike lanes help solve this problem by giving North Central residents dedicated space to navigate the streets separate from cars and pedestrians. Moreover, the bike lanes will help provide better sight distance, reducing collisions for drivers too. Finally, there are multiple schools in the area with a total of over 2,000 students. Many bike to school every day in unsafe conditions, but there is even more potential for students to bike if they have improvements that make it safe to do so. San Mateo is ashamedly behind other cities in its share of bicycle commuters because our streets are not safe. It’s time to do something about that.

We are sensitive to neighborhood concerns regarding parking availability in the North Central neighborhood, and encourage the city to analyze creative parking solutions such as:

Investigating overnight parking demand in North Central, which may or may not be a time with highest on-street parking demand
Opening underutilized private or public lots in the neighborhood for overnight parking
Establishing a residential parking permit program
Addressing, through outreach and, if necessary after an appropriate grace period, citation, vehicles that are parked in the same place on the street for multiple days in violation of San Mateo vehicle codes.
Pricing parking to encourage that some parking is always available

It says a lot about our values when parking is available on every street in North Central, but there are little to no bike lanes in the neighborhood. It is time to prioritize sustainable transportation over private vehicle storage on our public streets. Do not delay this project, and allow the cost of the contract to escalate. Doing so would risk eliminating the project altogether out of infeasibility, and we cannot let that happen. Please authorize the contract and approve the bike lanes with the proposed staff recommendation. Also, staff have pledged to do more direct outreach to the community and have done direct outreach to those who park on the side of Humboldt Street where parking will be removed. We also ask that staff conduct direct outreach to cyclists in North Central. Their voice deserves to be heard in direct outreach as well.