A public meeting on the final concept plans for four bicycle routes will be held by the City of Palo Alto on tonight, March 29, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Ohlone Elementary School’s multipurpose room, 950 Amarillo Ave.
The meeting will discuss plans for the Amarillo Avenue-Moreno Avenue, Bryant Street Bike Boulevard updates, Louis Road-Montrose Avenue and Ross Road bicycle boulevard projects.
The Amarillo project is near the existing U.S. Highway 101 bicycle bridge at Oregon Expressway and it would make improvements from West Bayshore Road to beyond Ross Road.
That route would link to improvements projects along Ross Road from Jordan Middle School to Louis Road and to Montrose Avenue and Meadow Drive.
The Bryant Street project would make improvements north and south of Oregon Expressway. Information on the projects is available at www.cityofpaloalto.org/bike.
I checked out the map and a lot of this seems really excessive — as if we are turning Palo Alto into some mini-Disneyland for bikes.
Isn’t it fine simply the way it is?
Your kid obviously doesn’t bike to school every single day like mine and have to dodge speeding cars and reckless drivers who whip up and down our neighborhood streets with TOTAL disregard for CHILDREN biking.
With all of the narrow roads carrying heavy traffic traveling well above the speed limit ( when it moves), and all of the stop sign and stop light runners, combined with people texting while driving– all going on at once while children are walking and biking to school– you’d better believe this town needs more and safer bike routes!
My own child was so afraid to ride on the asphalt that she was riding on the sidewalk. She was ticketed by a PAPD officer for doing that, on a street too narrow to include a bike lane!
Still no safe routes to Paly east west for Paly students south of Oregon.
The title of this article says “city-wide bike routes”, but the map in the link shows only 2 new bike routes: Ross Road and Amarillo Ave. While both are useful to people living nearby, they are short routes and hardly city-wide. I agree with the previous parent that there are still large parts of the city with poor bike routes, especially anything west Alma Street, including California Ave and both of our high schools.
Looks like Palo Alto Forward cheating with the “likes” again
“Looks like Palo Alto Forward cheating with the “likes” again”
ANY proof for that statement? Or just some sour grapes?
The ‘new and improved’ Bryant bike path will 5 new traffic circles. That means that there will be 5 fewer stop signs for traffic crossing Bryant.
City transportation staff have stated in a public meeting that stop signs are often ignored and are therefore unpredictably useless. This is most likely true. Their ‘solution’ is to remove stop signs and install traffic circles to force auto traffic to slow, if they can’t stop it. My experience passing through the traffic circle already at Addison (on a bike riding on Bryant), and other traffic circles in the area, is that drivers treat them as obstacles to speed around, not to slow around. It would seem to me that these ‘improvements’ are largely for problems that don’t exist, or are designed to improve auto movement on the bike route, neither of which seems to make any sense to me.
I have suggested scrapping the traffic circles, and adding stop stripes with existing stop signs in addition to new signs stating that bike and auto cross traffic (on Bryant) does not stop, at appropriate intersections.
I also suspect that the plan is mostly a done deal, unfortunately.
You can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig.
Why does the city and it’s consultants think that slapping some paint in the middle of an 4way intersection suddenly makes it a “roundabout”.
I lived on the east coast where there were plenty of roundabouts/rotarys They were not 10 foot circles painted in the middle of an intersection.
/marc
All this will do is move traffic on to the adjacent streets
I think you are right. The plan is to get cars off bike routes and to encourage them to use other routes. Unfortunately there is no move to get bikes off busy car routes and encourage bikes to use other less busy routes.
How much did the out-of-town bike route consultants cost?
Evidently the “rotaries” are being justified because they help avert head-on collisions. Other reports had the residents who oppose the rotaries asking how many head-on collisions there have been and getting no satisfactory responses. So they concluded the meetings to gather “community input” were just icing since the city was going to do whatever it wanted regardless of community input.