City Council & Staff,
We are writing to flag a safety issue with our bike commutes to school.
Our families commute by bike to Oak Knoll from Allied Arts every day. Under
Menlo Park’s current noise ordinance, normal construction activity is
permitted to begin at 8:00 a.m., just 15 minutes before school starts at
8:15. Perhaps this timing overlap was less of an issue historically, but
the scale and frequency of residential construction in our neighborhoods
has clearly increased, and we are encountering more and more active
construction sites along our route. For example within one block of Bay
Laurel & San Mateo there are 4 single family homes being built right now
simultaneously.
Every morning, at exactly the time most families are biking to school,
heavy trucks, deliveries, and construction equipment are also being
navigated through narrow residential streets (5+ vehicles/machines per
building site). On top of that, there are construction workers driving to
job sites, as well as parents driving through side streets around the major
school routes in an effort to save time.
We have already had several close calls, and the real concern is that one
of these encounters could end with a child seriously injured or killed. As
parents, that possibility makes what should be a safe, peaceful ride to
school feel stressful and high-stakes.
The obvious response might be to increase enforcement along these routes
during the morning school commute. But last year, a police officer came to
Oak Knoll and explained that this simply is not feasible. There are only a
couple of traffic officers on duty at any given time across the entire
city, and they cannot monitor all of the routes families use to get to
school for all of our schools, let alone just Oak Knoll.
If we cannot realistically solve this through enforcement, then we should
look at the rules creating the conflict in the first place. *We are urging
the Council to change the permitted start time for construction in
residential neighborhoods from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m.* A 30-minute shift seems
like a relatively modest change for construction projects, while
significantly reducing the overlap between children biking to school and
construction equipment, trucks, and workers during one of the busiest parts
of the morning.
Thank you,
Misha Silin - D4 Resident and Planning Commissioner
Matthew Rascoff - D4 Resident and Complete Streets Commissioner
John Leikauf - D4 Resident and Co-chair of Oak Knoll Parents for Safer
Routes to School
