Re: 12/1/2025 City Council Meeting, Item 5.a
Mayor Kate and Members of the City Council,
We at the Marin County Bicycle Coalition (MCBC) are pleased to see that the City is moving forward with an approach to roadway rehabilitation that incorporates multiple years of planning. This is an improvement over a year-by-year method, and allows better coordination between the DPW's important pavement rehabilitation duties and other needs of the City's roadways.
We would like to highlight a couple best practices that we believe should be incorporated into the repaving workflow in order to improve roadway safety and speed the implementation of the Citywide Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan (currently being updated).
Implement the Bike Plan With Repaving
The best time to change the configuration of a road is when crews are already mobilized to do construction work and will be restriping the road at the completion of repaving/resurfacing. City staff should review the bicycle/pedestrian plan against the paving plan and determine which projects might easily be implemented. Generally these will be those that do not involve moving curbs, but might merely involve restriping, traffic calming, or removing parking. In recent years, such opportunities have been missed, such as on 1st Street in Gerstle Park. The response we typically hear is, "We'll come back and do it later," but in reality, no neighborhood wants multiple waves of construction disrupting their lives.
Furthermore, even if that political hump can be overcome, it is wasteful to pay for two separate projects that could be combined when crews are already mobilized implementing the rehabilitation.
Pluck the Low-Hanging Fruit
In 2023, MCBC and our partners at Walk/Bike San Rafael urged the DPW to narrow the automotive lanes and buffer the bike lanes on Las Gallinas Avenue. This was not part of the original plan, but was accomplished with very little additional funding (some minor design work and extra thermoplastic paint).
No parking or lanes were removed - merely lines shifted around. A before/after speed survey conducted by local advocates found that speeding was cut in half after the overwide lanes were narrowed. While we were appreciative of staff's open-mindedness on this project, this win-win change would have not been made without advocates pushing from the outside. We encourage the council to empower staff to look for opportunities such as this.
Stop Worrying About Traffic Calming
While we realize that there is often pushback from fire departments around traffic calming, speed humps (or speed cushions, which have cutouts for wide wheelbase vehicles like fire trucks) have the potential to make neighborhood streets much safer and more pleasant for people walking, biking, or driving. We applaud the City's experimentation with the Spinnaker Point Traffic Calming Pilot and encourage the application of its lessons in a citywide traffic calming program, which could be implemented with pavement rehabilitation where appropriate. We will point to successes in the Town of San Anselmo, where the DPW has been installing quick-build traffic calming treatments to address speeding cut-through traffic. Previously, the city had an awkward, lengthy process by which residents had to complete nearly two dozen steps to successfully request traffic calming. At the direction of council, staff are now empowered to proactively install traffic calming on bike routes and other areas with cut-through traffic problems. We encourage a similar approach in San Rafael. The City currently has a very small number of traffic calming installations that have been functioning well for decades (e.g. Irwin St in the Bret Harte neighborhood or Belle Ave near Coleman Elementary School). These successful examples should be replicated.
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We look forward to conversations with the members of the City Council and the DPW staff about particular projects as they come up, but below is a preliminary list of streets that we hope to see improvements made to as part of rehabilitation:
● Andersen Drive
● Kerner Boulevard
● Las Gallinas Avenue
● Canyon Oak Drive
● Nova Albion Way
● Woodland Avenue
As always, we thank staff for their hard work and the city council for its time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Warren J. Wells, AICP
Policy & Planning Director
Marin County Bicycle Coalition