Tag: California legislation

AB 825 (Bryan) Safe Passage for People on Bikes

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Assembly Bill 825 been introduced to the California legislature by Issac Bryan. The bill would allow bicyclists to use sidewalks where safe street bicyclist facilities have not been provide by the transportation agency. Class 1 separated paths, Class 2 bike lanes and Class 4 separated bikeways are considered safe facilities. Note that Class 3 bike routes, which are only signing and sometimes sharrows, are not considered safe under this bill. It would limit speed on sidewalks to 10 mph and require that bicyclists yield to walkers. The bill passed Assembly Committee on Transportation last week and will go to Assembly Committee on Appropriations.

Take at look at the CalBike Support AB 825 for Safe Passage for People on Bikes page for more information, including a link to email your assembly member.

I posted two day ago about bicycling on sidewalk codes in Sacramento county. The county and all the cities prohibit biking on sidewalks unless they are recognized in the bicycle plan as being bike facilities. There are very, very few such designations. The City of Sacramento takes the reverse approach, that it is legal except where signed against, and there are currently no locations signed against.

Again, I’ll say that I don’t like bicycling on sidewalks, and I don’t do it, but I completely understand why others do. The are making the best decision they can to keep themselves safe from traffic violence. This bill recognizes that reality.

celebration, and caution

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Today is a day of celebration for housing and transportation in California, with the possibility of more to come in the next two days. Yay!

But I want to caution about the alignment of housing with transit. It seems like a no-brainer, right? As I’ve long said, you can’t have affordable housing without effective transit, and you can’t have effective transit without widely available affordable and other housing. The problem I’m concerned about is that most of our transit system is oriented to arterial roadways (the semi-high speed, many-lane roads that are also called stroads because they don’t function well as streets or roads, and also called traffic sewers). Or in the case of rail transit, often uses old railroad corridors or freeway medians that make housing development difficult and probably unwise.

Research indicates that people, particularly kids, who live near freeways and arterials have much higher rates of asthma, and many other health problems, and shorter lifespans. Is that where we want low income families and kids living?

Apart from freeways, most traffic crashes happen on arterial roadways, and particularly at intersections of arterial roadways, and freeway on-ramps an off-ramps. Is this the hazard we want for low income families and kids?

I don’t have an answer for this challenge, but I often think it would be better to upzone everywhere (the next increment of development), so that additional housing can be built in places with better air quality and lower traffic violence. Maybe we should be fixing the arterials first, before we build housing along them. Yes, that delays the benefit of easy transit access to housing, but good transit in a poor living environment is just not what I want to see.