From: City Council
To: Mary Gourley
Cc: Oriana Hart; Torran Korman
Subject: FW: City Priorities - Gravenstein Trail
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026 6:59:04 AM
Attachments: sebastopol-gravenstein-trail-destination-map cal-nev-2025-q2-thursday-legend.png sebastopol-gravenstein-trail-destination-map cal-nev-2025-q2-thursday.png Please see public comment as it relates to an agenda item on the upcoming city council meeting.
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Thank you
Mary Gourley
Interim City Manager
From: Silas Newby Stafford < >
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2026 5:06 PM
To: City Council <[email protected]>
Subject: City Priorities - Gravenstein Trail
I'd like to write to support the Gravenstein Trail as a top priority for the city. Most weekdays I ride my bike into downtown from the south side of town. It often feels very unsafe, despite the bike lanes. While I'm willing to do this, under no circumstance would I take my children on this route, nor would I ask my parents to ride their bikes here.
I also happen to work for an urban planning data and modeling company called Replica, we calculate the daily travel behavior of every single American, serving Caltrans, along with many other cities and agencies in California and Nationwide. I pulled the data for how people use CA-116 between CA-112/Bodega and Fircrest market. A few stats:
There's about 48k people using 116 on the south side of people on a typical weekday. Currently only about 500 of those people are cyclists.
Of those people, about 5500 of them are taking trips of 3 miles or less. These are people who would seriously consider biking or walking, if they had a safe place to do so (like me with my kids)
(attached figure) the destinations of folks taking trips of 3 miles or less cluster in the downtown area, making the case that they would be well served by infrastructure there.
The Gravenstein Trail would make these trips on the south side of town an beautfilu place to walk or bike. It would allow people to walk or bike to work and school who couldnt otherwise do so. They would reduce the amount of traffic on 116 (traffic often backs all the way up to Fircrest), reduce the amount of emissions, without reducing parking, disrupting neighborhoods. It would reduce our communities emissions, and would prevent future injuries and fatalities to pedestrians and cyclists in this part of town. I hope you will consider making it a city priority.
Thank you
Silas Stafford