users interact with.
We come in with the knowledge of what creates kind of a safe facility, a good user experience,
and the CIP engineering, they're the ones that make it come to fruition with a design
element.
Here we have a great green infrastructure.
They're the ones that make sure it drains properly.
So now jumping into some recent projects, the first being these un-signalized crosswalks.
This is actually one of our discretionary line items.
So what we do is we look at the un-signalized crosswalks in the city and do kind of one
project to update several locations.
So the most recent was we did six locations, three on Main Street.
This is, you know, between Geary and St. Louis Road on the northwest side of town.
Then we had two on Bancroft and one on Mount Diablo Boulevard at the Ace Hardware.
So of these six locations, there's a lot in common here.
We have five lanes of travel with that fifth lane being either a two-way left turn lane
or a dedicated left turn lane.
Each of these roadways have speeds of 30 to 40 miles per hour and that's the posted speed,
So keep that in mind that if drivers are actually
going to posted speed or more or less.
And then each of these, just on those two characteristics,
there's this possibility of a multiple threat pedestrian
crash.
So going over kind of what that is.
So on the graphic on the left, we
have car A, which is the one that's curbside.
And when you have these really wide roadways,
There's a lot of things coming at a driver.
They may not be expecting or even notice
a pedestrian standing there.
But of any car that's going to see it,
it's more likely that car A would see the ped.
By the time they see, react, and stop,
they can be close to the crosswalk.
And what that does is for any car approaching and car B here
approaching in this other lane, what car A is,
it blocks the line of sight between the ped and car B.
So now this pet essentially has to enter into another conflict
point where the line of sight is poor.
So what we did, how do we address these?
We wanted to improve the crosswalk visibility.
We wanted to slow drivers down so they have enough time
to perceive, react, and stop accordingly.
So what we did is we did hardened lane lines
and this, you know, very prominent feature.
So the hardened lane lines are these,
are those solid white stripes.
And what they, what we did is we narrowed the travel lane.
We added the paddle signs.
We added shark's teeth yield line.
And just based on feedback,
we've gone so far positive and negative across the board.
Everyone's slowing down.
So we are going to be doing some data collection post installation once school returns and
people have gotten used to it to really gauge how successful this has been.
And then we would be looking to do more of these types of improvements around the city.
And the staff contacts would be myself and or Rashad Culver who is the CIP engineer.
Another one is London Lane.
So London Lane is in the Shadelands Business Park.
The business park, you know, it has that shopping center with the Safeway and all those restaurants.
There's a school in there.
There's a very well-used recreational facility.
We have a brewery.
There's access to the Iron Horse Trail.
And on the weekend, we have Farmer's Market.
So it's a business park, but it's really transitioning into something more.
And with that in mind, the Shadelands multi-modal plan was done a couple years ago, and it called
for a separated bikeway on many of the streets in the business park but on London Lane.
So where this comes in to the CIP side is that London Lane, the pavement, needed improvements.
So we took the opportunity to implement what was on the plan.
So down below we have on the left side what was existing and then what we designed for.
So there is two 22-foot travel lanes before.
There's no parking.
The bicycles mix with the vehicles and there was a posted speed of 35 miles per hour.
What we did is we made the travel lanes 10 feet.
We added parking on one side and then created these separated bikeways.
And with all of those design considerations we had a desired speed of 25 miles per hour.
So on the right here you'll see kind of the post installation.
I want to say this was installed over several months and we'll kind of go over that but
this was the city's first full separated bike facility.
We've used the material and done this in practice over on Bancroft at the Cocoa Canal Trail
crossing but it was really just for a short distance and this was really a
full the first full segment so it was a really good learning opportunity for
what on the design side as well as the maintenance side and going in we knew
that there is going to be a maintenance challenge of how to clean the curbs our
typical street sweepers can't fit into this narrow area and so you know that is
something that's across the board in every agency something that people are
dealing with, and looking to address that moving forward.
This is a bus route, so post-insolation,
we made slide adjustments for buses.
And then striping is not enough.
So because of COVID, there was a shipping delay of these posts.
And for several months, it was just the striping in place.
And so what we noticed is that we
had changed the context of the roadway so much.
And people were driving in the striped parking lane.
It was not as clean of an installation as we had hoped.
And my, I would be the staff contact for this project.
So the next CIP transportation kind of teamwork
is pavement management.
And that's, we have like an ongoing program
that covers many types of projects.
And this one, the slurry and cape seal
is really a preventative maintenance project
we're gonna be talking about.
So annually, we collect pavement condition index, a PCI,
and what this allows us to do is understand
how well our roadways are doing,
which one's deteriorating more rapid,
maybe we can send our street crews out
and they can do some kind of patch repair,
but this is our way to inventory our facilities.
So talking about kind of what this is.
So based on the extent and depth of our pavement deterioration,
we'll do kind of either a slurry seal or a cape seal.
And really this is just taking off the first few inches,
maybe a little more for cape, and then replacing it
with a seal to preserve the lower levels.
So again, slurry seal is a couple inches and capes
a little bit more.
and Cape, anytime we do Cape, we trigger ADA improvements.
So this would be concrete work, curb ramps,
if appropriate, bull bouts,
depending on where we're doing the work.
So this summer, we're doing both a slurry and Cape Seal,
and this area is on the left side.
It's the neighborhood, it's south of Walnut Avenue,
between Northgate High and the San Carlos area.
It's most of the streets in those boxes, not all of them,
but that's kind of the bulk of the area.
And then you'll notice on the right side,
we have where the curb ramps are,
and you'll notice it's not every single corner,
but where the dots are is where
that cape seal treatment was needed.
And also highlighted here is this neighborhood
has a lot going on.
We have schools, the Ignition Canal Trail cuts through,
and we have school crossings.
So this is our opportunity, there's a blank slate coming in so we can come in with striping
improvements.
So first one, simply stop our placement.
Some of these new intersections, they don't have curbs.
And now with curbs, you want to make sure that where we're telling cars to stop are
behind the pedestrian path, simple.
School crosswalks, there's a lot of just conventional two stripes out there.
So we're going to be doing ladder.
And then for these trail crossings,
we're going all at it.
So we're going to be installing, it's called a triple four.
And it's the white and the green that's
currently at Bancroft and the Cocoa Canal Trail.
And it alerts drivers like, hey, yeah, this is a crosswalk,
but there's also cyclists here.
We're going to be visually narrowing the travel lane,
So striping an edge line, adding the center yellow,
doing sharks teeth, and all the signage that goes with that.
And for this project, the slurry seal
would be Michael Hawthorne, and he's
the CIP engineer who oversees kind
of the construction of it all.
So the other side of this pavement management
is a complete street rehab.
And that's what's going on with South Main.
So the limits of this South Main work
It's from Newell Avenue on the north side,
all the way down to the northbound 680 off ramp.
It's really this gateway corridor to downtown
and major destinations.
We got the Kaiser Hospital,
we have Los Alamos High School,
residential, the Creekside neighborhood,
the Park me neighborhood.
And it really is an active pedestrian area
with very limited crossing opportunities
with the only crossing opportunities
being out the actual signals.
And like I said, the pavement need to be rehabilitated.
So this is CIP, and then traffic jumps on
with some additional safety improvements.
The first is a new mid-block crosswalk.
This would be between Lilac,
which is the entrance to the high school, and Newell.
Currently, it's about 1,000 feet between the intersections,
and so we're putting mid-block right in the middle,
Flashing lights, curb extensions, lane narrowing.
We're adding that to the project.
And then we also are doing improvements
at the actual high school intersection.
And the recommendations as part of this project
actually came about from our Safe Routes to School study
and our observations.
On the left there you can see kind of the mass exits
of kids crossing and really just the inability
for vehicles to even leave the school.
It takes, of all the schools that we observed,
this one took the longest to kind of flush out
and really this is their only entrance
to the school parking lot.
So by separating the peds from the vehicles
with this ped scramble, we can, you know,
completely eliminate that conflict point
but also hopefully flush the vehicles out easier.
And then we are also adding some curb extensions
on the south side.
We would have done all the corners,
but Kaiser has large delivery trucks,
so we had to accommodate those.
And there's a very popular drop-off location,
or the movement is a southbound U-turn.
And so we couldn't really bull about that corner,
because it would have hindered a very well-used drop-off
location.
And with that, open it up to any comments or questions.
Great.
Rob, do you want to start us off?
We'll go in seat order.
Sure.
So I had a couple of questions.
Where did you get the idea to do the hardened lane lines out
of just striping?
So we saw it in Fremont.
Fremont had done it before.
And they have a very, we've been looking at Fremont
because they have a really strong vision zero plan
and they've had great success.
And so we've been looking to them
for their protected intersection design
and kind of see what they've done with,
you know, just cheap materials.
Have they, did you see any that were raised?
So in Oakland, they'll use a hardened center line
where they have a, I would maybe call it
a super mini speed hump.
It's about six inches wide.
It's yellow, about six feet long,
and it fits right on the lane line itself.
Did you consider anything like that,
or are you in the testing stages?
Would you be open to looking into something like that?
It was an interesting idea that I saw in Oakland.
So I'd be curious where in Oakland.
So I know I've seen them on striped bulb outs.
I know I've seen them in between the double yellow,
but I don't know if I've seen them
as a white hardened lane line.
Okay.
Yeah, okay.
I was just curious.
And then on the Lennon Lane with your cycle tracks,
were you able to find a way to do the street sweeping?
Cause that seems to be a major issue.
So currently what happens now,
So there's really two needs for our guys to access the curb,
and it's for the curb, for the street sweeping
to clean out the gutter,
and then also to access the drainage inlets.
So for curb cleanup right now,
it's all manual, I believe, with leaf blowers,
and it's very time-intensive and labor-intensive.
For our crew that needs to access the inlet
and bring in a large pump truck,
there's a tool that they can just remove the bollards
as they need to and access the drainage inlets that way.
Okay.
Have you, and maybe it's too early,
have you considered raised features,
raised medians rather than paint and plastic?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's absolutely something that,
that, you know, ideally we wanna do
because from a maintenance perspective that's,
They would way prefer that.
It really just comes down to money.
And this was something that, you know,
paint and the bollards are cheaper.
So we wanted to get something out there
as part of that need to improve the pavement at that time.
Right, and people then get used to the design and the concept.
So yeah, definitely understand that.
And then on South Main, in one of your pictures,
it looked like you were doing a lane reduction,
but I don't think that's right.
That would be the north bound,
which would be at the top of your page,
going down, there are two lanes there,
or is there only one lane there?
There are two lanes.
That's just the...
It's just the orientation of the drawing.
The orientation of the drawing
and that kind of darker shade areas,
the concrete and the curve, yes.
Okay.
Yeah, we're keeping the same amount of lanes.
Okay, those are my only questions.
Sure, I just have a couple.
The crosswalk improvements that are designed to slow down traffic, et cetera, you did talk
a little bit about some visibility issues there, and I'm curious if you considered the
flashing crossing, or was that just a budgetary concern?
So budget was obviously a part of the decision, but another, what's really good about the
flashing lights is you know it's it's a active detection so a pet will push the
button the lights will flash when the roadway is so wide and there's so much
going on with a wide roadway you know with that car maybe in that center lane
that flashing light they there's they're not those flashing lights aren't as
effective as say a narrow lane and so really it would be ideal if we could do
like a center refuge island but each one of these locations have very popular
driveways and it we would have to like do a further study of what we're doing
limiting access to these driveways by doing a median to just install an RFB so
we're not ruling them out at all of these locations it did just come down to
you what can we do now with the biggest bang for our buck yeah okay thank you
and then my other question is a little bit I guess bigger picture with the
crazy atmospheric rains and weather that we had this last winter did it set back
our pavement maintenance and repair at all? Was there any impact there
budgetarily? So I know from the massive rains there was damage to
pavement, sinkholes, that kind of thing. I know just from a staff time level a lot
of our, even on the design side, the engineering side, we were on our feet
addressing kind of other issues. So there was maybe a time frame kind of setback as well as both a
roadway physical well-being. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That's it. No questions.
Awesome. I've been taking Bancroft a bunch lately since Oak Grove on Tree to Bancroft is being
being redone by that other neighboring city of ours.
And so today, I decided to stop and actually walk across
that wide lane and not just drive it in prep.
And it does give you this feel, like, oh, wait,
I came into the street too fast.
And it did feel safer that it was being addressed.
And I think maybe a meeting or two ago,
I was asking about the bike lane improvements.
How do we know they were working?
What studies were being done and stuff?
And I think I was suggested that I actually get out and feel things.
And so I did, and I just really appreciate like feeling it and seeing it and experiencing
the difference today.
And then my one question is on the Cape Seal, when do you decide to do, what triggers that
specifically, which then triggers like the ADA improvements to the sidewalks?
I think you said it, but if you can clarify a little bit.
And this is not my expertise, so this is, you know, how best I can describe it.
But the pavement condition index, what they'll do is they'll look at kind of the surface
level cracking, and there's different cracking.
And what it essentially alludes to is the deterioration of a sub base.
And when we do this for the whole city and we see which roads are failing, you know,
you can identify pockets.
And it's kind of temporal, if you think about it.
It's like, OK, we did this one 20 years ago.
This whole neighborhood is kind of showing the signs
of it needs to be resealed.
And so it's really just, what from a preventive maintenance
do we need to do now?
So it's data-driven based on what's
worse at the moment, essentially,
from a preventative maintenance standpoint,
not like a rehab everything, like self-main standpoint.
So there's no real trigger.
It's just like, let's look at the whole city
and let's see what's failing and where
and let's try to seal it up.
Okay, thanks.
Just because when my neighborhood got totally,
the streets got totally redone and they looked nice
until PG&E yesterday,
like decided to spray paint everywhere on them.
They did not do the ADA compliance
where sidewalks are probably 60 years old.
And I was just curious about it from that standpoint,
because we would love more ADA compliant spaces on our sidewalk.
It really just goes, because there's
many layers of a roadway.
So it just has to do with how far the failure, how far down
that failure is.
OK, awesome.
Anybody else?
David?
The posts.
I'm sorry.
The posts.
How long do they last?
How long do the posts last?
So they're literally mounted into the pavement,
so a simple bump will scuff them up,
but they should still be there.
It would take kind of a really intense force
to pop them off.
You can see some on Bancroft that have been there a while,
and they show the signs of being there a while,
but they're still physically there.
So they've been proven to last a while under some impact.
Okay, thanks. And I see no members of the public in the audience. Do we have any online
or on the phone?
No.
Okay. Great. Let's skip ahead then. Okay. Are we on to the next?
One question. Do we have comments at the end? Or?
Oh, go ahead. Give. Go.
Okay. I just, I just had, I, it was, it wasn't a question, so that's why I wanted to.
Yeah. Sometimes I separate them out, but tonight's, I think, a lighter agenda, so.
so we can keep them together.
It was just that there's a,
I can't remember the name of the jurisdiction,
but others I think have done it too.
There's a machine that it spits out the concrete
and you can actually,
you put a couple of dowels in the pavement
and then the machine puts out a quick dry concrete
that you don't need forms to install.
And they can do that without doing,
it appears they can do that without doing
detailed engineering drawings where you go out and survey,
you just have a couple of checkpoints
to make sure you've got the right elevations
and then this machine, based on the width that you need,
just goes down the roadway and extrudes,
Is that the right word?
Spits out the concrete and it dries immediately.
So there's no forms, it's quick.
It seems like it would be a lot cheaper,
not as cheap as paint and plastic.
But as Walnut Creek gets more mature
around these kinds of solutions
and you learn how to solve the drainage
and the street sweeping issues,
I think it would be a good next step
to provide a better environment
for both the drivers and the cyclists.
And I can't remember the name of the city,
might be Santa Monica.
I can find that out and send it to you.
It's pretty cool.
Thank you, and we do have an asphalt extruder.
And if you look over at Broadway and Lincoln,
right near the library, that northbound approach
That that used our asphalt extruder kind of the same way, but thank you. We've not at least I was unaware of a concrete one
anyone else I
so I live in the neighborhood that's getting the
pavement treatments and was very excited to see some of the
concrete intersection work with the
ADA compliance piece of it and was wondering what had triggered it so
appreciate tonight's report.
And I had also encountered the lane hardening
on Bancroft and on North Main Street recently
and was wondering what was going on
because I didn't recall, I was like,
did I overlook something that we talked about
at Transportation Commission?
But here you were tonight.
So it was great to hear a little bit more
about the rationale because it was something
I had not seen before.
And I think just because of the novelty of it,
it made me slow down a little bit.
So I'm curious to see kind of longer term
what the impacts are.
It was a little bit perplexing at first,
which I think is not a bad thing.
Because again, it just causes you to be more conscious
of what's going on in the roadway.
So thanks for all of those updates.
Awesome.
OK, great.
Thank you so much.
We appreciate it.
The next on the agenda is for the commission's consideration
is bicycle parking requirement updates.
At this time, I invite staff to provide their presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brianna.
Good evening, commissioners.
My name is Henry Ru.
And I'm a transportation planner with the traffic engineering team.
Tonight, I'm going to be talking to you about a proposed update
to our zoning code, very early stages here,
but basically to amend our bike parking requirements.
Recently, there's been a huge raft of state laws.
I'm sure you're aware many of them are relevant here,
but the biggest one is AB 2097.
That eliminates automobile parking requirements entirely
from anything within a half mile of a major transit stop.
In our case, the most relevant there are the Walnut Creek
and Pleasant Hill BART station.
So that is in effect right now, that is adopted state law and it supersedes any local ordinances
on the matter.
Our existing bicycle parking standards right now are a percentage of the automobile parking
standards.
So that means that within all of those sites within a half mile of BART, right now we have
zero bicycle parking required at all.
So we need to do something about that.
So essentially the idea is to put into our code specific standards for bicycle parking
based on square footage and other relevant standards like units for residential enrolled
students for schools so that they can stand on their own.
And this not only allows us to avoid that AB 2097 problem and evaluate things more objectively
but it also means that when we're revising either standard they can be changed independently
of each other, which means that you don't have to worry about lowering or, for example,
instituting parking maximums that then put bike parking maximums into place.
So on the staff report, there's that chart that shows kind of the proposed numbers.
We're going to go through all those specifically, kind of one by one, see what it means in practice,
but just first I want to clarify, short term is referring to publicly available bicycle
parking, whereas long term is not necessarily available to the public.
In a case of like an office context, it could be for only the workers, residential, it could
be for only residents.
It's often a cage or a locker.
It has to be secure to really be defined that way.
So you can see here, the specific chart, we're going to go one by one.
But I do want to clarify tonight, we are only looking at the required amount.
So the design standards for short-term and for long-term, those are going to be included
in an objective design standards update as part of the greater city initiative.
Working on that, you will see them fairly soon, but tonight, this is just about the
number required.
So in practice, retail, the proposed update is one space for 1,500 square feet of a rentable
floor area.
That is a common standard that shows up on all the plans.
It's essentially the usable space.
So what we have proposed here, it's heavily slanted towards short-term because of retail.
You've got people coming in.
In practice, that would mean that the Rossmore Safeway required about seven bike racks and
four long-term spaces for workers.
Banks are a more even split.
You've got the in-and-out short-term use and the workers.
so we've proposed 50-50 there.
F&M Bank has 5,000 square feet,
so that would require one rack and two long-term spaces.
Public assembly, this one's a little bit more different.
This is based on public assembly area,
which is for like clubs, churches, lodges.
This is the area where the people actually come in and be,
so back rooms and the like are excluded from this.
And again, this is something that shows up on the plans.
It has to be noted in development review, so it's not really any extra work to enforce
using the standard.
So the example here is North Creek Church.
It's about 10,000 square feet.
That would require eight racks and five long-term spaces.
Office is one per 2,000.
It's heavily slanted towards long-term because you're mostly looking at workers who are using
this rather than day-to-day people coming in, customers, but there is some of that required.
So in this case, the Atrium, big office building, 120,000 square feet, that would be eight
short-term racks and 44 long-term spaces.
Medical care, similarly, you've got a lot more kind of slanted towards long-term.
It's mostly workers, but you do have people coming in.
For medical care, they're not necessarily going to be biking, but it can happen.
You want to leave the options there.
So that would be for this huge, you know, John Muir, million square plus square feet,
Would be 70 racks and about 400 long-term spaces and residential is based on dwelling units rather than square footage
And we've got a nice easy to understand ratio of one per one
So NOMA apartments at 135 would be 17 racks and a hundred spaces
Hotel similarly is based on guest room rather than square footage one per eight
this leaves us with
two required for residents in at about a hundred guest rooms and then nine long-term spaces and
school
School is a little different because in practice for public schools the state architects can essentially do whatever they want
So this would be enforced for private schools and suggested this is be the numbers
We send back if they ask us what we think but we can't really enforce it for public schools
But just as an example, Los Lomas has 600 students registered for its maximum enrollment.
So that would require 57 racks and 38 spaces.
This is a pretty progressive standard.
Schools specifically as, you know, institutions as children of the future, we wanted to focus
on those as a priority for more advanced bicycle parking standards.
And similarly, because of the specific conditions involved, short-term parking also is proposed
to be required to be secure for schools uniquely.
So that could just mean isolated out of the way,
but it's not as open to everyone.
There's some protection involved.
Finally, we have light industrial,
which is a little weird because there's very little
of this actually in the city.
This is more of a future-proofing.
Maker's Row up north by treat is zoned that way,
but not any actual uses really do that in practice.
But just as like a hypothetical example,
if 100 square foot Home Depot showed up,
that would be three racks and 20 long-term spaces.
So these proposed standards were based on
other jurisdictions like Oakland and Davis
based on best practices,
but they were also based on
Walnut Creek standards in part.
We basically did a big comparison,
massive spreadsheet to look at
with the automobile parking required now,
what does that look like in practice?
What is the number that is actually needed based on square feet?
That was all evaluated together and we came up with these proposed standards
but we are seeking your feedback on them.
That's why I included the practical examples.
If you have suggestions, thoughts, comments, unique concerns, I would love to hear them.
So I'm going to open it up to you now.
All right.
We'll start in the middle of Commissioner Cagle.
Any questions, comments?
I have questions.
These, would these be for new developments moving forward
or something that would have to be implemented
throughout the city once the requirements are there?
So this would be the way, this would be in the zoning code.
So the way that works in practice
is that mostly it is just new developments.
Right.
If they come in for review, then we will review for this.
So that's essentially how it would come up.
If people are sending in plans,
this is something that's getting checked against,
But if it's minor, then it can just kind of
stay existing non-compliant.
And the other thing there is downtown
is kind of an exception to the retail.
We're looking at specific steps for that.
We're kind of considering doing what Oakland did,
which is just to allow existing racks
in the public right of way within 50 feet
of the entrance to qualify.
We were also talking about it in the loo program.
But we're not forcing all of downtown
to meet these standards if adopted immediately.
There's a lot of parking that we have provided there
And we want to find a way for that to qualify,
either through an in lieu program
or just by adding that stipulation.
Right, and within a half mile of transit,
it sounds like there's a need per your presentation.
So I was curious if there was gonna be a requirement
for the businesses and buildings within that area
to be required to do it.
So for the new one's going up definitely.
For the existing ones, technically once this is adopted,
it would be existing non-compliant.
So once they come in for anything, really,
anything exterior or kind of big improvements
that need a building permit,
a planner's looking at that and they're saying,
okay, you do not need these requirements anymore.
So it's not just whole new buildings where this comes up,
alterations, renovations.
That's kind of the standard for code updates
because you can't force the whole city to do it all at once.
It seems a little more feasible with bike racks,
but in general, it's not.
And even in this one, it would be pretty hard to do.
Thank you for explaining that.
And then have you surveyed the business community
about what they think their needs might be
or maybe what their current needs are?
I mean, looking at the needs that were outlined for,
John Muir, for instance, it sounds like a lot.
I'm just curious if you guys have surveyed
our business community.
We have not yet.
We're planning to reach out to them about that.
Once we have a firm proposal
for the downtown program especially,
we want to go to them with something
instead of this, you know, kind of prototypical state.
Right, right, okay, thank you very much.
Madam Vice Chair?
I had similar questions and was,
I think, are we doing comments now too?
Or it doesn't matter?
Okay, because we're not making any decisions, right?
Okay.
So, one thing to just think about with medical facilities,
particularly hospitals, is that it's not just patients,
but it's a lot of staff, and workers of various sorts,
and visitors, and so I think it makes sense
to have a pretty significant, I mean,
right now it's pretty minimal,
and it's not anywhere near entrances.
So I think that's also something to,
I mean, I guess that probably wouldn't fall into zoning.
Maybe this would come in with the different
design requirements in terms of placement.
Yeah, so that, sorry.
Because like right now, there are places
where they're technically on the grounds,
there are bike racks,
but they're very, very far away from the entrance
that you have to enter the building.
Like I noticed that at like the Shaveland Sports Complex,
there are places where like the accessible mike wrecks
that actually work are far away from like
the specific activity that you're trying to get to.
So it's not that convenient.
And so if there's anything that we can do to increase,
to make sure it's like actually usable and not, you know,
in some hard to access,
even if it's technically publicly accessible.
Yeah, definitely.
So that is going to be in the design standards.
We're gonna have a firm definition for that.
We're going to kind of put it through its paces
to make sure you can have weird exceptions.
We don't want people putting bike racks
in their dark basement closets.
The point is to be accessible.
That's an important design standard,
and it's gonna be a big consideration for those.
And then are there any other mechanisms
besides like a major renovation
or something that requires the city to review
plans for an existing building. Are there any other mechanisms to trigger
compliance with this zoning or ways that the city could look at in set or
there is accelerating that there is code enforcement if there's a code
violation residents can report that and then it goes to code enforcement they
investigate often that means people have to come in with planning for an after-the-fact
permit or things like that. I don't know that it would really be applicable here because
it would probably they would probably get away with it under existing non-compliant there's
a lot of provisions for that. So I think in terms of like more aggressive timelines on city stuff
part one is getting this stuff adopted soon enough that all those new developments going up near
Bart have to abide by them but the other side of that is just us providing accessible bike
parking ourselves we can do that faster than anything we don't need to wait for
any developments on that and we are doing that downtown now already okay and
then are these numbers I mean are from from I guess your perspective do they
seem aspirational or are they quite conservative in terms of like you know
making sure this is going to be manageable for people?
Like where do these numbers fall
in terms of like being sort of future oriented
versus kind of?
So the intent was to find a good balance.
So we surveyed a lot of like really bike progressive cities
like Davis, San Luis Obispo,
and then we kind of calked out
what ours would be by square footage.
And in some cases we split the difference.
In some cases we kind of hedged like with schools,
We really wanted to lead from the front there.
That's a very progressive standard.
But if you look at like office building in Davis,
they are one per 1500 square feet.
We proposed one per 2000 and they also use gross.
So that would mean that in practice,
the needed bike rack would be like 60 instead of the...
Yeah, so we had 44 with these in Davis
that would require 60, for example.
So in few cases, is it as aspirational as possible?
It's mostly trying to be reasonable in terms
of what we can practically implement
and kind of what the residents are going to be amenable to.
We're not trying to impose onerous restrictions
on people.
We're just trying to improve the infrastructure for this.
OK.
And then is there, with the state legislation,
Was this factored into the state legislation,
or is this something where the city just kind of
proactively looked at the fact that this would mean
there is no required bike parking, and that, so.
Yeah, so the state legislation
did not factor this in at all.
Not all cities, some cities already have standards like this
that are not tied to automobile parking, a lot of them do,
especially a lot of the cities we looked at
that were kind of on the more progressive side of things
in this specific area.
For the automobile-based cities with transit,
this is just something that we kind of have to jump in
and fix or we'll see our requirements go away.
And that was not really a direct part of the state law.
Yeah, I'll add to that.
The state law understood that there could be
bike parking requirements that are associated
with vehicle parking requirements.
So it mandated that the state put together
some kind of task force to start working
on bike parking requirements,
which will happen in several years.
And so that puts us in a little bit of a sticky position
because I guess there's something that could be said
that we could still impose
our existing bike parking requirements,
but it just makes things more complicated.
And considering, you know,
even in the North downtown specific plan,
we're moving, we have parking maximums there,
which are very aligned with typical transit-oriented
development along those lines of less vehicle parking
encourages people to take more trips
by walking, biking, or transit.
But then it impacts the bike parking requirement
because that's directly tied when in reality
you'd want to probably offset that
because you want people to take their bikes instead of cars.
so there's that maximum shouldn't really apply to the bike parking piece. So we're trying to
um be how this all came about was our planning staff is working on updating these objective
design standards or establishing them and they've been through the design review commission
committee and to planning commission on this topic several times. It's not in final stages yet
but as part of that they identified that bike parking needed to be addressed and so they
sort of handed it over to traffic engineering to you to look at because you know the bike parking
piece it is a lot of it is in the public right of way but then even so it's definitely impacting
you know how many how much or yeah the quantity of bike facilities we really should be anticipating
or planning for on the streets and then just generally from a transportation planning
standpoint and trying to encourage more bicycling so basically they you know
they handed it over to us so we're gonna take that through on their behalf but it
really came into that objective design standards which as Henry pointed out
before really stemmed from all these new housing state laws that that went
through. Yeah well I'm really thankful that the other commissions and brought
brought this discussion up
and that staff proactively is addressing this.
So I just appreciate that.
And I'm really supportive of making these changes
because yeah, that is concerning.
If no parking is required,
that that would also eliminate bike parking potentially.
And developers and other property owners
They are very cautious of what they're spending on and it's easy to cut things. So I
am glad that that we're taking a look at this and I'm really supportive of the
The guidance that the proposals that have been brought to us today. Thank you
Yeah, I also appreciate that you're taking a look at this and updating them I think it's important
But I do think it needs a little bit more work
Your John Muir is an example
if you provide the
Allocation that you are saying that you would provide there that means 20% of all of the parking is
bike parking so that means
That one out of five spaces that people could park in would be for a bicycle and that might work for a Davis
or another community that has extensive bike infrastructure,
and it might work for a community that has flat streets with not a lot of topography.
We have topography, I've brought it up multiple times about needing to have better connections over YVR,
But it's a 10 to $20 million project just to get a single path in to provide a connection
so you could even ride your bike to the medical center from here.
And so I think there needs to be a little bit more work in looking at the parking ratios.
One other one I'll just bring up is the office.
per 2,000 square feet. 2,000 square feet holds about six people in an office. That means
one in six people are riding their bikes. I think that's aspirational, but I don't think
even Berkeley and Oakland have those kinds of standards. Davis might, and I can understand
why they would, but I don't know that you would find those in the Bay Area, even in
more progressive communities like Fremont or Berkeley or Oakland. So I would suggest that you
give these another look. And normally I wouldn't mind because it's aspirational,
but these take a lot of space. And so if you try to put 500 parking spaces
on John Muir, where you try to put 55 spaces
at this office complex, where do they go?
They take up a lot of space.
You look at how much space the bike lockers take up at BART,
and you try to imagine, okay, I've got to fit 44
of those somewhere, especially in a renovation
of an existing building where you want to get everybody
up to code, but you don't have a blank slate to work from.
You're working from an existing structure.
I think the other thing I would try to do is
in where you have mixed use areas like downtown,
I think those are some real opportunities
where it might be difficult to put the parking,
the bike parking in front of the building that's being renovated
or change of use, but maybe there's a place,
like you said, 50 feet away or 75 feet away.
And I think that those kinds of that kind
of flexibility is really important in the community.
So I appreciate that you're incorporating that.
And then, yeah, that's it.
So I'm really happy you're doing it.
I just think that it needs a little bit more work
about the implications of the action,
because once it's in your code, then we can't change it.
It becomes more difficult for us to change it.
So, thank you.
Thank you.
Would you be able to go back to the medical center slide?
Yeah.
So this, John Muir, it's an enormous number,
but it's an enormous complex.
I've got a lot of workers there.
Yeah, and they're actually in the garage,
there is like a secured area
where quite a large number of bikes
are currently able to be parked securely.
I don't know how...
Yes, and this is not more, this is just total.
Right, right, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, so I'd add to that, I mean,
So the John Muir campus that was planned
at least a decade ago, more than that.
And so it's been phased in over time.
Obviously the UCSF piece is under construction.
They're almost done with that.
But just to give you context,
and I'm not sure if this is actually
what the parking requirements were at the time.
So I can't speak to what they have out there right now,
but if you look at our code as it is right now,
if you're gonna build a brand new John Muir
with this floor area it would require 4,680 parking spaces
which means that because we require 10% bike parking
it would be like 468 if you were just looking
at that baseline 10% taken of the parking spaces.
But there is, I mean, I think we brought this item to you
because we wanted to get a good feel
for the direction that we were going
in terms of how we deal with these bike parking spaces
because we had a lot of back and forth on the staff level
about contact sensitivity, what part of town it's in,
is it adjacent to a trail or is it in the downtown
and how do we deal with that?
And including looking at how do we start sharing
that bike parking in the more urban areas.
So we, yeah, there's a lot to look at still
but we feel like these ratios
We're really good jumping off point based on sort of the direction that we wanted a head in terms of looking at this from a fresh
perspective
Okay
first in the
downtown core area
how
How many bike rocks are currently deployed within the city right away or available in a garage or or anything?
And do we know like how much are used at all?
like an idea, it doesn't have to be exact numbers but...
Matt might know but I'm sorry,
I'm not sure about that information.
Yeah, we can follow up with you on that information
but generally speaking, we do get,
we have received several requests from residents
over the past one to three, one to two years especially,
I think, yeah, who were really requesting
more bike parking, especially short-term bike parking
in and around the downtown that was nearby the destinations
that they were trying to get to.
And so we, you know, we've been adding them as we can,
but that's part of a broader discussion
in terms of how much bike parking we can provide
in the downtown generally.
And so this is, that is different,
but I guess it's sort of,
It's related to what this is talking about.
It's just that this in particular
can apply to like a shopping center,
the orchards, for example.
Whereas, in the more urban environment,
we have to think about what that approach really is
and what that design standard could be.
Yeah, that goes to my next question, right?
How are you just looking at it?
And that's helpful.
So I was just curious, and yes,
I think we would all say we would like to see
more accessible bike parking downtown, so we encourage that.
For this, I love what you guys are doing.
I know how hard it is to change city zoning laws
and require these things,
so I appreciate the work you guys are putting into this.
I would just suggest outreach to the businesses, right,
in this case, talk to John Muir Health,
just because that one's come up a couple times,
Talk to the Downtown Association.
Talk to the tourism board for the hotels.
I think just that outreach, those conversations,
I'm sure some people will object, right?
The hotel doesn't want to have, like, 50 new bike parking
spaces.
But it's really just important to outreach to them.
Include them in the stakeholder.
You're asking them to make the changes in time.
Don't pass this and then go to them, right?
at least include them in the conversation early,
even if they don't go this way.
But overall, I'm impressed.
I think it's a good tact.
I like where your numbers are going
and your strategy behind the numbers.
So thank you for the effort.
Thank you.
One more thought.
Like this would be separate from this work,
but it would be great to see other ways
of incentivizing bike parking
for regardless of whether they would be required
based off of zoning or renovation or whatever,
but for people who just wanna do this
because it's the right thing to do
or because it might help their business
attract certain customers,
it'd be great to see if there would be some way
incentivizing property owners to to install this type of infrastructure so
that it's not just the stick of zoning code but also the carrot of something I
don't know what that would be but but it would be great to see what we can do to
to make to encourage more of this yeah definitely thank you can do that okay I
see no members of the public in the audience do we have any members online
line?
No.
Awesome.
Well, we always appreciate public comment and participation, so we always encourage
people to join us.
And I'm surprised your, Sam, your mom's not, you know, here with a comment.
Okay.
So at this time, are there any commissioner comments overall?
All right, well, any announcements?
I have one that I want to add.
I was talking to a friend that was on San Jose court
in the San Miguel neighborhood, and I think a year or so ago,
you guys came and presented.
Thank you.
Oops, sorry.
Thank you.
And you guys presented on some changes there
to the bike and crosswalk there.
And so I asked them, like, what did you think?
Like, do you like this?
Is it annoying?
And she said, like, the one person,
And they have two kids under the age of 10,
and she said this was beneficial because somebody
was going to get hit crossing the street.
It was just horribly designed.
And so it was just nice to hear that feedback.
And then I proceeded to tell them our role here.
And then they had a list of other complaints, which
but I wanted to give you that feedback,
because I know how hard it is you work.
And you don't necessarily hear the good and the impact of it.
And I thought that was important.
Announcement I have is the ccta citizens advisory committee where I was serving as chair
I was reelected as chair. They apparently think I was doing a great job and decided to have me back
That was that anybody else
Thank you
Okay, I hereby adjourn staff. Sorry, I forgot staff. It's okay. They're most important
Okay, so really quickly. I want to let you all know that after all of your hard work on the local roadway safety plan
We've been bringing updates to you over the past year. Basically. We did take it to a study session on Tuesday
And we've got really positive feedback. We are
Intending to take the final plan along with a resolution to council on Tuesday, August 1st
So, thank you for all of your hard work feedback sitting through all of those sessions we really really appreciate it
We also, in anticipation of that plan getting adopted,
applied for $300,000 grant funding
from the feds on the,
it's the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant.
And that would be so that we could start implementation
of the safety plan, of the local roadway safety plan.
And then we did get awarded a little under $200,000
for a curb management plan.
And so actually, Henry just used that terminology earlier
in his presentation, but really, it's
talking about how we use the curb.
Is it for parking?
Is it for loading?
Is it for something else?
And so giving all those things sort of consideration,
but we will be bringing that plan to you all,
but also there will be many stakeholders involved in that
since it is in the downtown and will heavily
involved the business community as well.
So I wanted to give you a heads up on that.
And then also Brianna has been working on
Safe Routes to School study.
And so we've been putting together
those final recommendations and just sort of
as part of that, even though we don't necessarily
have a deliverable ready yet,
we know that school is back in session
in about four weeks or maybe three weeks.
So it's coming up soon.
And so we'll be reaching out to all the schools in the city,
just providing them with educational materials,
just reaching out to get folks aware,
reminding them we'll be doing a social media campaign
just to remind them to slow down around schools.
Kids are out again.
So I just wanna give you a heads up on that.
Awesome.
All right, I didn't mean to not include staff updates
because those were all important, so thank you.
Anything else?
Okay.
I hereby adjourn this meeting on July 20th, 2023,
the Transportation Commission.
It says I can hit the gavel in a second,
so I'm very excited for this.
Our next meeting is scheduled for September 21st.
Thank you, everybody.