Speed and safety in San Mateo

In the early 2000s, neighborhoods started requesting more stop signs to deal with speeding and cut-through traffic. San Mateo staff would deny these requests, but they would be appealed to the Public Works Commission, that would more often than not approve them. Staff responded by creating a stop sign policy that defined a process and the warrants needed. The declared intent was to make approvals justifiable and consistent. The actual outcome was to make it difficult to install stop signs. A bit later, neighborhoods were asking for traffic calming — speed bumps and the like. Again, the city responded with a neighborhood traffic calming policy that also had the same effect.

You could certainly argue that more stops signs or speed bumps is not always the best remedy. You can’t argue that the public hasn’t been very concerned about speeding and safety for a long time.

Our public roads are designed according to rules created in the 1960s by the federal government for rural highways. These rules give primacy to motor vehicles and the free and fast flow of traffic with little consideration for anyone else using the road. The California Complete Streets Act 2008 requires cities to plan multimodal streets that meet the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists and others in the next general plan update. However, San Mateo has yet to update its general plan with plans to do so this year.

In September 2022, a little girl was almost killed by a speeding and inattentive driver while crossing Franklin Parkway with her father. Dashboard camera video of this incident was horrific and widely publicized. To its credit, the Public Works Department reacted immediately by installing temporary speed-reduction measures. The Bay Meadows neighborhood has been complaining about this intersection since 2017 due to numerous pedestrian near-misses. It took video proof to really get the city’s attention. Before this, staff usually responded that the rules preventing them from doing anything substantive. Basically, unless enough people are injured or killed and it was captured on video, forget about it.

Franklin is a four-lane collector road with a 35 mph speed limit, designed to move motor vehicles as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Because of its design, drivers routinely drive 40 mph or faster. Research shows that speed is detrimental to pedestrian safety. A person hit at 40 mph has an 85% chance of dying. Franklin also bisects the southern end the Bay Meadows neighborhood. There are apartments and townhomes on both sides of Franklin. It is a dense residential transit-oriented development that was specifically intended to be walkable. Why do we have a road running through Bay Meadows that is inherently dangerous for anyone other than a motorist?

The reason is that the engineers designing Franklin in the mid-2000s were only thinking of how to efficiently move cars and trucks from one side of town to another. All their incentives, training and knowledge were aligned with this. They didn’t consider that someone might want to walk across Franklin even though it cut through a neighborhood where walking to a park or visit neighbors with your child or dog was the norm. This is 1960s rural highway design applied to much denser walkable suburbia in the 21st century. The same thinking gives us higher speed limits when what we really want is lower speeds.

So, what to do? First, the San Mateo City Council should clearly state in a resolution that the city’s policy is to prioritize safety of all road users over speed except for the few, highest volume roads. The council should make this policy real by committing more money from the general fund for street safety infrastructure projects instead of relying primarily on grant funding. Then, the Public Works Department needs to take this policy direction seriously. It needs to retrain its existing staff and hire new staff that understand what it takes to make our streets truly safe.

Mark Eliot has lived in the city of San Mateo for 30 years.