EXISTING CLASS PROTECTED ROUTES
SAFE NEIGHBORHOOD ROUTES What did you learn from Stephen Clark? He’s compiled all the solutions to all the toughest problems in other American cities. We’ve got these tough problems that we basically said we can’t do anything about it. Meanwhile cities that have a little more ingenuity than us have been willing to try things, test them, evaluate them, and they know what works. The toolbox just got a lot bigger. And a lot of the tools are cheap. They don’t necessarily mean taking parking or space from traffic.
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Give me some examples of the low-hanging fruit. Protected lanes are something we eventually want, but paint is the lowhanging fruit. Paint is something you see in Goleta and Ventura. Oakland and Long Beach both have green lanes that are shared lanes, but it’s really clear that a bicyclist belongs in that space. The perceived safety just shoots up. And because of increased motorist attention, the actual safety [does as well]. And that’s paint. That’s not breaking any asphalt, any curbs. It’s super cheap, and it’s effective. Bicycle boulevards [which are clearly marked bike routes]. We have these dumb sharrows [shared-lane markings] that are not backed up by anything else. And you put it on a dangerous street like San Andres. People are confused, and they continue to drive really fast. Get yourself on Rancheria Street down to the City College. You don’t just have sharrows but directional sharrows. You have bicycle boulevards. Let’s just get a coherent bicycle-networks signage system. People don’t know about the Anapamu Bridge. People don’t know about the Ortega Bridge. How many millions of dollars went into those bridges? They should be marked. That’s like a $200 solution for a $2 million bridge. Which projects are your top priorities? The missing links. Hollister in Old Town Goleta. Upper State Street. The area around Mission Street where Bath and Castillo just end. [These are all areas where a bike lane ends abruptly.] The return of the Haley Street bike lane [that only runs from West to East]. The Western Goleta Valley from where El Colegio ends connecting to Ellwood. Why is it so hard for people living in Ellwood to get to the [UCSB] campus? The biggest and best project in all the South Coast in my personal opinion: Car-
pinteria Creek in Carpinteria already has an undercrossing, and that needs to be extended along where Via Real is to get to the neighborhood on the mountain side of town. Carp is a great bike town, but the has severed it, and all of the bridges are too narrow. You already have an undercrossing that’s a bike path. It’s just not connected, and it’s only 200 yards. Your average driver might see big infrastructure changes as a huge cost just to appease a few cyclists. That’s a political problem we have. We’re seen as a special-interest lobby. We’re not here to be appeased. We’re here to make cycling accessible to the general population. We’re here to get our transportation-funding policy to be thoughtful, and to make those investments effectively and prudently. If you are constantly investing in more capacity, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. … You put in more lanes, [and] people will drive on them. There is finite space, but how do you manage that 38 feet curb to curb? First off, let’s be real. We over-invest in parking. The high cost of free parking is that there’s not parking available in a lot of places, which is not economical. In a true liberal, laissez-faire economy, parking should be structured. Whatever the government provides for free without a lot of rules gets abused. Parking gets abused. Furthermore, congestion is logarithmic. The last 10 percent of traffic causes 90 percent of the problems. If you could convert the last 10 percent of trips off of any congested road into walking, bicycling, bus, carpooling, you would not reduce congestion 10 percent. You would reduce congestion very significantly. And bicyclists pay into the transportation system. The gas tax only covers about a third of our transportation costs. The rest of it is property tax and sales tax. So if somebody ever says to you, these bicyclists aren’t paying their way, bring them to me, and I’m going to give them a talking to. [Laughs.] We have to look at our transportation system and how we manage it. I think we haven’t. I think we’ve emotionally looked at how our transportation system works. If you ask an investor who lost a lot of money why they invested in a certain company, they’ll say,“Oh, I love that company. I feel good about that company.” Was that a thoughtful
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