1 From: isaac
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 10:09 AM
To: City Council
Subject: Unagendized Public Comment: Complete Streets
CAUTION: EXTERNAL EMAIL - Ensure you trust this email before clicking on any links or attachments.
Recent complete streets designs have rejected safety im provements based on preliminary LOS analysis.
Staff decided to not pursue designs including critical safety improvements on Middlefield and more recently Rengstorff, both of which are on the city's High Injury Network. This does not seem consistent with the general plan and other adopted city policies, which disfavor LOS, encourage multi-modal analysis, and emphasize safety of all road users.
- The city's own website links videos labelled "Problems with LOS" and "Benefits of VMT" - The city has adopted a policy that replaces LOS with VMT for all CEQA impact anlysis - The city's brand-new TDM ordinance is targeted at reducing VMT. - General plan goal MOB-8 emphasizes multimodal analysis:
MOB 8.1: Multi-modal performance measures. Develop performance measures and indicators for all modes of transportation, including performance targets that vary by street type and location.
MOB 8.2: Level of service. Ensure performance measurement criteria optimize travel by each mode.
MOB 8.3: Multi-modal transportation monitoring. Monitor the effectiveness of policies to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per service population by establishing transportation mode share targets and periodically comparing travel survey data to established targets.
In the Middlefield and Rengstorff design phase safety improvements were rejected as infeasible after initial LOS analysis, without doing any multimodal analysis, or taking into account mode shift.
The standards staff cites for LOS appear to come from the MTA handbook The City’s acceptable intersection operations standard is LOS “D” except in the Downtown and San Antonio areas, where the intersection operations standard is LOS “E.” The MTA Handbook also requires additional analysis: bicycle level of traffic stress (BLTS) and pedestrian quality of service(PQOS). And if there are any adverse effects to LOS, BLTS, or PQOS there are mitigations suggested. One potential mitigation for LOS degradation is to "Construct multi-modal improvements to increase transportation capacity for pedestrian, bicycle, and transit modes". The Middlefield and Rengstorff complete streets projects already contain many such improvements. But multimodal analysis and potential mitigations were not addressed in staff reports or presentations. 2 These safety improvements - protected bike lanes, protected intersections, etc - are in the adopted Vision Zero plan. They are requested by the community. Designs with these critical safety improvements ought not be rejected so early. They should be presented as alternatives, with a full mutlimodal analysis and facts about adverse effects to traffic flow. Then council and the public can make a fully informed decision about if LOS or other impacts are a reasonable tradeoff.
I request staff be given explicit direction, and it be included in RFPs and contracts awarded by the city:
follow the adopted vision zero recommendations, adhere to the general plan goals, and allow the city's elected representatives to decide.