From: Rick Ballard
To: City Council (San Mateo)
Cc: Clerk
Subject: Public comment, council special meeting item 1, Complete Streets North Central Plan Date: Monday, March 18, 2024 2:22:50 PM
Dear city council,
We need to improve bike and pedestrian infrastructure in North Central and implement measures to calm traffic.
Increasing the use of biking, walking, and public transit as transportation is critical to meeting necessary climate goals. It also leads to a more livable city, with many benefits for health, small business, neighborhood cohesion, child-friend urban design, and resident happiness.
In the complete streets study session, please give special focus to these issues, and in particular to cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
I’d also like to highlight Delaware street near downtown as an example that exemplifies our current problems. As a road so close to downtown it should be a good transit corridor for walkable and bikable transit, but instead it is a very wide road with high-speed traffic. I have nearly been hit multiple times as a pedestrian crossing legally at N.
Delaware and Tilton. I’ve witnessed multiple near-misses at S. Delaware and Cypress (plus an accident with two autos). And I regularly see residents biking down the sidewalks, despite the explicit marking of Delaware as a bike route. Bikers on the sidewalks indicate pent-up demand for biking infrastructure; people want to bike, but our streets feel too unsafe for them.
As a confident cyclist I am able to do nearly everything here without the use of a car, but most people aren’t as confident. We need the infrastructure to make it possible, and there needs to be a critical mass of that infrastructure before people will feel safe to adopt it; not just one or two bike lanes and a mostly-unsafe city.
Thank you very much,
- Richard Ballard
San Mateo Resident