Dear city council, At some point in the near future, I hope that we as a city can have an earnest reckoning with the unintended consequences of rapid development in the Bayside area. In the meantime, please do what you can to make it safer for the people who are trying to walk and bike between home and school, home and work, or workplace meetings in that area. Why? 1) It helps make traffic manageable. A huge part of Facebook's traffic mitigation strategy (staying close to/under trip cap) depends on their ability to a) bus people in and then b) move people around between buildings without having to resort to single-occupancy vehicles. Hence, you have a large number of people on bikes competing for space with hundreds of buses. I've ridden there recently and can tell you that attempting to share the road with the buses in places where there aren't separate lanes for bikes is pretty terrifying. Let's give the bikes their own lane. 2) We want folks to respect our plans. We've had these lanes in our planning documents for a long time, and city planners have shared this information with developers. There are developers who were depending on these innovations; similarly there are developers (including, maybe, Sequoia Union High School District) who hoped maybe we wouldn't follow through, enabling them to under-park their building and then use public right-of-way as additional parking. Residents and developers alike need to know that we will uphold our plans and agreements. 3) We need a safe bike route to TIDE. We have a high school on Jefferson; it's open; and it will be serving hundreds of kids, roughly half of whom (at any given time) will not be legal, licensed drivers. Traffic around this area is the stuff of legend; parent drop-offs are not going to be easy or quick. We need both bus service and safe bike routes to the school, which Lydia Lee and others have been working to establish. We should not require 15-year-olds to shoehorn themselves between parked cars and giant commuter buses. It will not end well. Thank you for your consideration. Katie -- Katie Behroozi 650.804.1812 (cell) Received on Tue Aug 20 2019 - 15:11:30 PDT
