What’s one of the most important decisions a city can make? The budget.

Mar 12

This past week, the Mayor of San Jose released his budget message. The budget message marks the start of the budget process and your help is needed.

The way this works is the Mayor’s message will be discussed and adopted by the Council on March 15th. From that point, the professional staff of San Jose will take the Council’s direction and use it to shape the draft budget. The draft budget will be released in April, go through some community meetings, and then be adopted by the Council by June.

Now is the time to influence the budget so that the City funds transportation in a way that ensures the streets are safe for you and your loved ones to ride. Below is an outline of the easy and quick ways that you can help make sure the budget is one that keeps us pedaling towards a bike friendly city.

First, some context.

In the Mayor’s message, many priorities are highlighted. One of the most pressing is affordable housing and the ways the City can continue to assist homeless families and individuals. This is an important issue and one that intersects with our ability to create healthy and just communities, part of the mission of SVBC. SVBC strongly supports the construction of affordable housing near jobs and services so that people aren’t forced to drive everywhere.

We were also heartened to see the Mayor elevate traffic violence in his budget message, which is what we want to focus on in this blog. 2022 is off to an awful start with 20 traffic deaths so far. It causes us to ask the question, how, through this important city decision, do we in the bike movement best support the City’s ability to increase the funding needed to eliminate traffic violence?

As Co-Chairs of the City’s Vision Zero Task Force, Councilmembers Peralez and Foley recognize this as well. At each Task Force meeting they somberly start by remembering the community members who have unjustly lost their lives on our streets these past several years. In a recent update memorandum to the Transportation & Environment Committee, Councilmember Peralez, outlined several good recommendations that, in combination with the direction in the Mayor’s budget, and a committed Department of Transportation staff, reinforce that we in the bike movement have solid partners at the City who are serious about solving this problem.

So how do we make our streets more safe?

The way to fix this is through the design of our streets. Simply put, the look and feel of the street causes drivers to behave in different ways. Speed kills but if we narrow lanes, sharpen corners, put in protected bike lanes, people drive more slowly, and lives are saved. The City is doing a lot to build safer streets and the question is, does the budget adequately reflect that?

If asked, the City would highlight that much of the City’s street redesign is rolled into the annual pavement maintenance program. We like that and commend the City for making sure that bike projects get built as a part of regular, annual road maintenance.

But, we need to do more. While pavement maintenance is a great way to get new bike infrastructure built, these projects need to happen now, not years from now when the streets finally get repaved.

Additionally, there are projects outside of the pavement maintenance program that are not funded. How do they get funded? The City does a great job aggressively pursuing federal, state and regional grant dollars and in fact secured “quick build” money to get some projects out of the ground pronto. But we need to do more.

This past weekend while riding my bike home from Veggielution’s Eastside Connect program to deliver farmboxes by bike, I happened upon a gruesome crash on San Antonio near King. It involved two people on a motorcycle who had been hit by a person driving a car. No less than a dozen police, fire, and paramedics responded, professionally attending those hurt and conducting a thorough investigation of what happened. It was jarring to witness, watching a woman lying in the street moaning in pain, unable to move.

In the midst of all this, I could not help but think how needless this was, and the harm and wasted time and money on a daily basis. Ten times a day on average, police officers and fire fighters tend to crashes, 20/month of which are fatal or result in a serious injury. If only we spent money designing our streets to be safer, immediately, we wouldn’t spend time and money deploying police, 10 times per day, doing this very depressing work. This, all on top of the lasting trauma and pain inflicted by our streets on those involved in crashes.

Given the number of deaths and crashes on our streets, given the increases in gas prices due to the war in Ukraine, and given climate change, it is imperative that the City continue to prioritize street safety by figuring out how to dramatically increase the budget to build the type of streetscapes that are welcoming and safe.

What should you do?

Contact your councilmember and send them a version of the message below by email. A ready-made email with prepopulated email addresses for the Mayor, City Manager, and council members is here.
Let your friends know what you’re doing and in the process, help educate people about this issue. Try to get them to do the same.
Tune in to the March 15th meeting and speak in support of the message outlined below. The link to the meeting agenda is here and Zoom link is here. Click this link for Instructions on how to observe and speak during the meeting on pg 4.

What should you say/write?

Below are some talking points and sample emails you can pull from. If you can, insert why this issue is important to you to make it personal.

Talking points:

Thank you, Mayor and Council for recognizing the importance of street safety. San Jose is one of the few cities locally that has officially adopted Vision Zero and is actively working to pursue a vision that facilitates walking, biking and transit.
We are alarmed that the level of traffic violence continues to skyrocket in San Jose and while we understand the complexity of balancing a budget with many important priorities, the City needs to do even more to ensure that our streets are safe. San Jose needs to put even more money into building safe streets, approximately $100 million annually above the City’s existing funding, which would cover the City’s Bike Plan, Vision Zero improvements, Complete Streets projects and the trail network. Also:

Pavement maintenance is one good way to make the streets safer but we also need to aggressively pursue other projects such as those identified in the City’s Vision Zero plan. Increase Capital allocations to fund more than 4 quick-builds and fund staff capacity to manage and deliver these projects quicker.
The pavement maintenance program is a great way to restripe streets however, it’s too slow. Fund staff capacity to avoid deferrals and expedite the pavement maintenance program.
Fund this work out of the general fund, which is a key way a City demonstrates its priorities.
Please increase funding for streets that are, by design, safe, and build those projects ASAP.