Bicyclists use the Humboldt Street bike lane in San Mateo.
Belmont leaders are pushing for bike lane infrastructure as part of the countywide push to make improvements along the 22-mile stretch of El Camino Real.
Cities throughout the Peninsula have been weighing in on the types of improvements they’d like to see along State Route 82, the official name for El Camino Real, in a project known as the Grand Boulevard Initiative.
GBI is a nearly 20-year-old effort that involves ECR improvements throughout the entire county, however, it has undergone some twists and turns. The initiative was once focused on housing and land use along the corridor. But with stricter housing mandates from the state, SamTrans recently pivoted to focus more on transit-related projects and has been collecting feedback from numerous cities along the Peninsula to improve biking, transit and pedestrian access along 22 miles of El Camino Real, from Daly City to Palo Alto.
During a recent Belmont City Council meeting, SamTrans presented city leaders with a few ways to improve the corridor, including widening sidewalks and removing some street parking to make room for a dedicated bus lane or bike lanes. Another option just proposed widening sidewalks and adding more trees along ECR.
Councilmember Thomas McCune said the city's traffic doesn’t justify a dedicated bus lane.
“We have buses, but it's not that kind of system where you have so many buses that you really benefit from dedicated bus lanes,” McCune said during a Feb. 10 meeting. “That one to me is a non-starter.”
Other councilmembers agreed that they’d prefer to move forward with a bike, not bus, lane.
“The bike lane really reflects the facts of the world that we live in — cars do predominate — but also the world that we want, more folks on public transportation, more people on bikes and more people on their feet,” Councilmember Gina Latimerlo said.
Bike and pedestrian infrastructure is a likely outcome for most of the jurisdictions along ECR, especially as residents have increasingly made calls for improvements along busy corridors. In January, a 62-year-old woman was killed at the El Camino Real and 17th Avenue intersection, prompting renewed concerns over the dangerous intersections along ECR. Changes to the corridor are also particularly difficult and time consuming, as it falls under state, not local, jurisdiction.
The initiative is still in the early stages and could change as other cities decide what improvements they’d like to make.
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(6) comments
Hilarious. Councilmember McCune says, “We have buses, but it's not that kind of system where you have so many buses that you really benefit from dedicated bus lanes.” Really? Where’s the data for bus riders vs. cyclists? I’d say we don’t have the kind of system where you have so many bikes that you really benefit from dedicated bike lanes. How many bicyclists do you think are braving the rain? Versus bus riders braving the rain? Hey Belmont folks, start protesting your councilmembers because they don’t have your best interests at heart because they’d rather remove higher volume buses to install discriminatory bike lanes. Where’s the data for their decisions? Or is it based on feelings?
They do a 20 year effort called "Grand Boulevard Initiative". They spend millions on consultants, on staff hours, on plans, on slideshows and year 20, each individual city is still just winging it and making it up on the spot.
One wants bus lanes, one recommends bike lanes, Burlingame does neither, because ECR is "too residential" there.
Shouldn't that have been all figured out year 1 or 2? And not year 20-25?
Embarrassingly incompetent picture our San Mateo Democrats are painting here.
I am very happy to hear this news. As a bike rider who commutes by bike through Belmont, I can't overstate how important bike lanes are to encourage people to get out of their cars. E-bikes are increasingly accessible and allow more people to use bikes to do things they used to use a car to do, and that's only going to increase. Building infrastructure to support that is key. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: there isn't much bike traffic on ECR because there aren't bike lanes. Poining out that people don't ride on ECR now isn't a reason to not build bike infrastructure.
Thank you, Belmont City Council!
Most of this is political theater anyways. Belmont isn't running the show here. Palo Alto too learned that if CALTRANS wants this, Caltrans will do this.
And Caltrans is in the bind to proof the can keep some of the promises Newsom made when he vetoed a law that would have forced Caltrans to turn ECR into a "Complete Street" anyways.
Thank you Belmont Ciry Council for your Fourier-forward leadership!
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