Palo Alto, the home of the legendary Ellen Fletcher Bike Boulevard, just approved an astounding $9.6 million for the construction of a network of new bike boulevards. The reimagined streets will utilize speed bumps, chicanes, and roundabouts to create low-stress corridors along 7 miles of streets where bicycle travel is prioritized over driving.

Bay Area Youth - Want to step up and use your leadership skills to make a positive impact for youth throughout the SF Bay Area? We would love for you to join the Student Advisory Council and help us plan for the upcoming Youth for the Environment and Sustainability (YES) Conference in February 2018.

On June 7, Redwood City held another Citizens Advisory Group (CAG) meeting on the El Camino Real Corridor Plan with a presentation from consultants. The CAG, staff, and consultants are coalescing around many of the final ideas for the plan, which includes protected bikeways on El Camino. The inclusion of protected bikeways in the final plan has been bolstered by the survey, community outreach, and the traffic analysis.

Please email city.council@cityofpaloalto.org NOW with your support for bike boulevards funding and Safe Routes to School programs to ensure that they will continue being funded through next year. You can also attend one of the next two meetings, at which these items will be on the agendas. More details and suggested talking points below.

SVBC proudly introduces our report on Protected Bike Lanes on El Camino Real. Written and researched by our intern, Miguel Salazar, it collects and examines information on local and national protected bikeways projects. The report and accompanying factsheets combine reliable sources to better explain what a protected bike lane is, how and why protected bikeways are the safest treatment for the widest range of users, and the business and environmental benefits of protected bikeways.

A recent VTA Board of Directors decision to delay approving the Measure B program guidelines means that the money from the measure will likely take a couple of extra months to start flowing. But it also gives advocates like SVBC and our members another chance to push for some tweaks to the guidelines. In particular, we want to make sure that the money earmarked for education and encouragement programs (anything from Safe Routes to School bike rodeos to open streets events like Viva CalleSJ) is spent wisely. And that means monitoring those programs to see what works and what doesn’t.

We are excited to announce the San Mateo and Santa Clara County Team and Company Bike Challenge winners from May's Bike to Work Month competition.

Today we spotlight SVBC member Emily Beach. Emily is a recently elected Burlingame City Council member. She has also recently joined the task force of the Grand Boulevard Initiative, a project that seeks to reinvent El Camino Real "as a place for residents to work, live, shop and play, creating links between communities that promote walking and transit and an improved and meaningful quality of life."