 Class two facilities. For designing, we consider different needs and different speeds. We do have to consider pedestrians since we do not segregate here. It's all together. So we have to see that. And these are all based on HDM guidance. You can see them there. We can also share our presentation and in our report, we'll put it all together out there. But for the most part, we're focusing on the bottom users to move them a little bit faster. In terms of facility design, we do have to consider speeds for designing and widths. And you'll see a little bit more. The guidance that was provided kind of at this 10,000 foot level is a separated facility for 25 miles an hour. No more than that. And then a shared facility with pedestrians, a 20 mile per hour. Facility design, the widths, the wider, the better. That's usually the case for any facility that includes bicyclists. And if there's sharing of pads, I mean, the minimum standards that we can allow, and these are all based again on HDM guidance as well. We called for eight feet, but our preferred widths are about 16 feet. Live. It's the grading of these as with anything. And this is something that has to be considered here in the States because of gradings. So the maximum grading allowable is 5%, but it's on sustained rates, it's limited to 2%, just to make it easier and much more comfortable for the user to go through. This one in particular, this bike highway actually connects over downtown, which is literally at the end of the picture to the airport in Bogota. In terms of materials on surface, the smoother, the better. Mostly we call for concrete and better surfaces with less inconsistencies that way. Again, less friction and more easier to go through. You can see here that there is a separated facility for each of the users. That said, these are slower routes that do intend for a little bit of mixing. We also call for additional wayfinding and identification. That's one of the biggest, biggest, biggest, and I should start biggest things that bike highways look for, for coherency, so that everything is all together, so that people know where to go and how they're going. And then this is brand new. Some users have already seen this. We're still working on this project. These are some illustrative concepts that we have developed. These are indistinct, even though some folks may actually know where this is. We've come out with some concepts on elevated bikeways. There have been a few different ones that have been considered here. Connecting over to facilities and providing facilities and comfortable crossings for users. Connections to transit also, and larger and longer trails as well. We do wanna increase the connectivity to transit and of course make facilities safer to cross over crossings. We wanted to try a little bit cookie. I know in the U.S. we don't usually have middle lining facilities, but we wanted to try something better to help users cross interchanges or really big highways, and this is one of them. These will be also featured in the website and they're already in our website as well. And this is in the rural setting, connecting two different shared use paths and facilities. Of course, there has to be a separation with the roadway, five foot minimum, Caltron standards that we wanna include. We also looked at potentially improving crossings. So every single crossing that you've seen has been protected or separated as well. We have also been looking at under crossings on different roadways and different highways. And again, you'll see these in the survey. You'll get a link. So please take a note of the link. But we wanted to make it easier. Again, less friction between users and less friction between pathways. So of course we use the under crossing. Unfortunately, in the U.S. we've not been focusing too much on the under crossing. So we opened up the crossing. We included increased lighting and increased facilities and making it a little bit more amenable for users, as well as to connect to different facilities. This one is with transit. We wanted to kind of highlight bus islands. Yes, many of these are class fours or class ones. You'll see that there are places where they'll have to be class threes and they'll mix with class two. So we wanted to highlight that interaction between different facilities. This is the website that I was telling you about. We do have a survey. So everybody here should take a survey. Please, please, please, please, please. We do wanna hear from you. It's bit.ly dash, or no, not dash. What is that? Slash? There you go. Thank you, tech people. D4 Bike Highway 2. So that's a survey. Either way, you can always check out the website. It'll link to the website. It is Bike Highway Study on CalVat, CalTrans Bay Area. And that is my presentation for now. I'm gonna seat it over to Sergio. Oh, there you go. Sorry. No worries. So, Sergio, before we dive into your presentation and as it gets pulled up, just a quick question, because I know you're gonna talk a little bit about funding, so to just sort of set you up for that. One of the potential avenues of funding that a lot of people are really interested in is QuickBuilds, because they're fast. They're relatively low cost. So how does the QuickBuild compare and why would, you know, why pick a major project like a Bike Highway versus a QuickBuild? So I guess there's a lot of ways to answer that question. I think the idea of a Bike Highway is you wanna create a facility that stretches for a long distance that probably crosses jurisdictional boundaries. So we can use a State Highway as an example corridor where it does connect to different communities. So it could be a good spot to co-locate a Bike Highway. However, that's built, whether it's through a QuickBuild method or through concrete, you know, I think there's still some flexibility in that as long as we're meeting the objectives of a Bike Highway of meeting that long distance travel need and the continuity. I think those are the key factors. So I think with our study, we're not really preferencing QuickBuild versus, you know, a more permanent solution. It could be a phasing strategy, perhaps, like if you start with a QuickBuild and then once you, maybe there's future programs that can help support funding a full build of the Bike Highway that could be a potential strategy. And we can talk about that more with some of the examples that we bring up. Great, let's dive in. Great, thanks. So, hi everyone, I'm Sergio Ruiz. I'm the Complete Streets Coordinator for Caltrans District 4. Why is Caltrans interested in Bike Highways? That's what I'm hoping to answer with my presentation and to provide a little more background of our study that Mauricio talked about. I don't know if any of you were able to join the panel this morning on state leadership in Complete Streets, but there was a really great overview of our new and redefined priorities in the state, particularly around multimodal networks, shifting the mode to address climate change and addressing equity. And all those point to the idea of supporting these larger networks for biking that would really help shift the needle in a lot of these priorities that we've set for ourselves. We're also aligning our investment priorities to align with these goals. And so we feel like Bike Highways are a really good opportunity to kind of include bicycle travel and not just transit express lanes, things that we've been investing in over the past few years. So I think there's a lot of opportunity out there. It's just a matter of tapping into that and really getting as much as we can out of our existing programs. And maybe you know, there's a need for separate programs as well to help support this. So there are a lot of documents that kind of outlined these priorities that are kind of implicit in the goals of a Bike Highway. Also mentioned real quick, the development of Bike Highway Networks was a strategy identified in our State Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan that was done back in 2017. So this is kind of an offshoot of that identified strategy, but kind of focusing on the district level. I won't get into too much detail on this on what Caltrans' role is in general. I'm sure you're all aware of who Caltrans is and what we do. We basically own and operate the State Highway system, but we also develop guidance and standards for bicycle facilities, highway and streets that a lot of the cities use. And then through CalSTA and the legislator and the governor, we set priorities for the State for funding as well. So I'm already still talked about this a little bit. We're a little bit unique in the state in that we have a Bikeway classification system and that's by statute. So it's in our streets and highways code. There's really no way to get around that. So we don't really have a definition of Bike Highways, officially speaking. We have best practices and we have desired characteristics that we wanna recommend for Bike Highways, but none of it's formally defined in any of our guidance. I feel like it'd be great if we had that somewhere in our standards or guidance, but right now we don't. So this is kind of a first step, I think, in looking at what it could mean when we say Bike Highways and what are those characteristics and what's the desire? So mode separation is a big part of that. We do have our Class 1 or Class 4, but when you look at actual projects and concepts of Bike Highways, those lines are sometimes blurred in terms of what is a Class 1? What is a Class 4? I feel like there could be a little bit of nuance in there and it could make it a challenge sometimes to apply our standards in some of these different contexts. So we have to keep that in mind when we're talking about facilities where we wanna separate walking and faster bicyclists. Yeah, does everyone here, does anyone not know Class 1 or Class 4? I can get into just for, okay. Yeah, so there we go. So Class 1 is a shared use path. You're basically sharing a facility with pedestrians and bicyclists and it has to meet ADA standards. But you could also have a facility that's all at the same grade that has like a bike lane striped separate from a pedestrian lane that would still be considered a shared use path, a path. So that's where it kind of blurs the line where we're calling some of those separated bikeways because you have separate lane but there's no vertical separation. Once you get that vertical separation, then it's a Class 4 bikeway because you're providing a space that's physically separated for bicyclists from motor traffic and pedestrians. So that's where it gets a little tricky sometimes. Also this is the same exhibit that Mauricio showed of the different wayfinding treatments but we have to follow our manual, California manual and uniform traffic control devices which sets what kind of signage we can include to make sure it's all uniform, hence the name. So there isn't as much flexibility in that but we also see the desire of branding, being a key component of bike highways to really attract more users and make sure that there's continuity and people know that they're on the bike highway wherever they're getting it from, getting on from. So that's a key aspect that I think we need to explore more what we can do, what are the current limitations on that from CalTransPoint of view. Just the different type of state highway corridors that we can look at, there are freeway corridors. I already showed some of the concepts we already are developing that utilize freeway corridors that you have to basically think of the ramp crossings and how those are treated. And then it's what we call conventional state highways which are surface streets that serve as state highways. And a lot of these just look like a lot of the separated bikeways that a lot of cities are investing in on some of our surface streets. But what would make it a bike highway is the continuity and the span of multiple jurisdictions to really provide that long distance travel. So that oftentimes that has to happen at the regional level. We're a little unique in district four or the Bay Area in that we have a lot of toll bridges, some of which actually have bike paths and they serve sort of the same function as a bike highway in that they serve regional bicycle needs. Some of them are a bit wider than others. So you have the ability to travel faster, some not so much, but it provides a really good opportunity to utilize the existing crossings we have and then we think about where additional crossings should be prioritized. We also have a lot of regional trails. So while it doesn't meet the recommended widths or characteristics of a bike highway, particularly in more rural areas that might not be as much of an issue because you won't have as many pedestrians crowding the paths. So you can still meet the purpose of a bike highway in many ways. So this is just an overview of the study, why we developed it. So we basically wanted to identify the best practices and develop recommendations, particularly in the Bay Area and in California contexts. We also are looking at state highway corridors and ranking them in terms of bike highway suitability. So looking at potential bicycling demand to see where it might make more sense to invest in these bike highways to attract more riders. And then to develop concepts that we can then showcase as kind of illustrative case studies. So just another plug for a survey. There's the link again. Hopefully it's the same link. So, yeah, so. So the links tend to be case sensitive. So if you didn't type it in exactly as presented, you might not, it might not work. Yeah, well, hopefully we can share this afterward or you can go to our main website, which is on the upper right, d4bikehighwaystudy.org and the survey is right in the homepage of that. So that's another way to get there. And it's also in Spanish now. I think when we launched it, it was only English, but now we have that available. Thank you. We also have a summary of our first. So this is our second survey. We did an earlier survey that really informs some of the recommendations that we're already sailing over. So I won't go through them again here. And these are just some of the maps that were that were developed on the suitability scoring that we've done on on state highway corridors. So that that information is available on our website as well. And some of you have to search to our stakeholder working group presentations to find at least draft versions of those. So when it comes to implementation, you know, I think we're still kind of figuring that out in many ways. We have various funding sources in the state. We have the active transportation program, which is our only dedicated funding source for walking and biking, but it is severely oversubscribed and it wouldn't be able to handle or it wouldn't be able to find a lot of these visionary bike highway projects that are being developed around the state. So we're really hoping we can tap into some of other, some of the other programs that are that exist like the solutions for congestive corridors and other SB1 programs, as well as potentially some federal programs that currently exist or are in the future. There are different strategies or approaches to try to use these funding sources. One is potentially tagging on these regional bike improvements to other improvements like transit, where you can really shift the modes and provide more of a complete street. There's also phasing. I think I have a couple of examples where yeah, here we go. So these aren't necessarily being branded as bike highways, at least not yet, but they really serve a lot of the objectives and these are regional projects that are being pursued right now. One is the Bay Skyway looking at, right now you can cross the east span of the Bay Bridge, but it doesn't connect past Yavuzhwana Island right now. So one way of thinking about building out that as a bike highway is a phased approach where you build out these missing connections for the first phase and use a ferry to make that missing connection until you can fund a full corridor. Another example is the East Bay Greenway. So this is not being marketed as a bike highway, but it does span many jurisdictions. There is a phase one strategy looking at state highway corridors to develop class four bikeways, but also include some transit improvements as well to make it more of a complete corridor. And then ultimately utilizing railroad right of way to provide a fully separated facility. So those are the examples and I'm happy to discuss in Q&A and the other details of our study. So with that. Great, thank you, Sergio. So we're gonna get into a local example of a bike highway, but as we're transitioning, I do wanna mention that like down in Southern California, the LA River bike path is one of the paths that we, as LACBC have actually looked at, turning into the backbone of a transportation, active transportation backbone all throughout LA County. In theory, once it's fully connected, it would allow people to ride 51 miles from the headwaters of the LA River all the way down to the port of Long Beach. Right now there's an eight mile section of it that is missing as a funding source, the Metro and the County of Los Angeles actually pass a tax measure in order specifically to help provide additional funding, including funding for that project to close that eight mile gap. And so projects like that, that allow people to smoothly ride from, covering these long distances are exactly what we're talking about here. And so Lauren is gonna talk to us a little bit more about the central bikeway study that she's been working on. Great, thank you so much. It's great to see so many people interested in this topic. So I'm gonna be talking about the central bikeway study which is VTA's first feasibility study for a bike super highway. VTA is the agency I work for. We are the transit agency and the congestion management agency for Santa Clara County. The work that we did is, I wanna acknowledge our agency partners. This is a multi-jurisdictional project. It's being led by us, but we've had a lot of support and effort from the other cities and Caltrans. It's also funded by a Caltrans sustainable communities planning grant. I also wanna acknowledge our CBO partners. This is the first time VTA has hired CBOs as part of a project and we learned a tremendous amount about how to do it and how to do it well and things we could improve. And they were absolutely instrumental to reaching out to the community during the pandemic. This project started in, I think, like right at the height of the pandemic. So two thirds of our outreach was done on lockdown. Since this is a statewide conference, I wanted to give a little bit of geographic perspective. Santa Clara County is located in the Bay Area. We are about a 50 minute bar ride south of Oakland. And the county is two million people. We're the home of San Jose, which is a million people, the 10th largest city in the United States. I want you to remember the shape because VTA has developed a plan to put together a 17 corridor bike super highway network that crosses the county and goes all the way from Palo Alto down to Gilroy in South County. It's built off of, thank you, clapping. So I wish I could tell you all these solid lines were already constructed, but they're not. But I have labeled the trails that currently exist. So the Bay Trail is at the top. It's already a great commuter route. And then there's the North South Riparian corridor trails that I've also labeled. Many of them are in the city of San Jose who has absolutely stellar trail system. And then one of the things that's a challenge is how do we do this east-west connectivity, right? There's not a lot of, there's all of the rivers go north-south, we can't put any rivers going east-west, we can't put any trails east-west. So we pretty much know that anything east-west is gonna have to be on the street or some other right-of-way. So this is the study area for the central bikeway study. Zoom in. We studied, we decided to choose this area for a variety of reasons. So it has excellent connections to the trails. It hits three of those trails that are north-south trails currently built. It runs through several disadvantaged communities in both Santa Clara and San Jose. Santa Clara is the city, there's a city of Santa Clara and the Santa Clara County. It also connects to a lot of transit. And as the transit agency, we were really interested in this. It connects on the eastern most side. Can I actually do like a thing on this one? No, I'm gonna walk over and like point. All right, this is the Variousa BART station, which is the southern terminus currently of BART. VTA is building BART to go downtown San Jose and then come back up and hit right here. So this connection would hit two of the BART stations. It also has VTA light rail, which is here and here. And then there's also Caltrain. So BART comes down from the East Bay, from Oakland. Caltrain comes down from San Francisco. So Lawrence station, Santa Clara station, College BART station, tiny little station, and then eventually Deirdre on downtown. That's Caltrain. So this is an excellent way to get people who are coming from outside of the county to other places in the county. So I know we heard a bit from Sergio and Mauricio about what makes a bike super highway. And we also have some tenants here. They are direct, they're accessible. And by that, I mean, they take you where you wanna go because we don't think it's beneficial to build a bike super highway that no one's gonna actually ride on. They're dedicated, meaning bicyclists should have their own space separate from pedestrians, separate from drivers, they're efficient. I mean, notice we don't say fast. They're efficient, you have reduced delay. And one thing that we think should really, they should be attractive. They should be a pleasure to ride on. They should feel like better than a standard bike lane, a better than a standard separated bikeway. So the study itself, it was about a two year study. We wrapped it up in February. So the full final recommendation is online right now. We're going to our board of directors in June to get it approved. It evaluated three alignments within that study area against the scoring criteria that you see listed here on the slide. Any one of the alignments could be designed and built out as a bike super highway. So physically it could meet the criteria. But we wanted to make, we wanted to figure out what alignment would best meet the criteria. We developed the criteria in collaboration with the community and I'll talk a little bit about the outreach in a minute. So for example, we asked people where they would like to bike to and asked them to put dots on a map. And we also asked people what lines they could draw the bike super highway, where would they want it to go? And we use that information to actually weight and score some of the criteria here. So the, where do you want to bike to that played into the access score. So an alignment that provided better low stress access to the destinations people were trying to get to scored higher than one that have not as good access. So the outreach. So we were able to do one in-person outreach event and it was amazing. The last in-person like big round of outreach was this fall and the pandemic restrictions had lifted and San Jose had their giant open streets event the Viva Kaya San Jose, which regularly gets like what, 20, 30,000 people. And we were able to put together a pop-up example of what the central bikeway could look like. We're, don't worry, Sergio, I'm not gonna do our guile bike lanes, but. This is just to get people's attention, right? I don't think that would pass muster with Caltrans. So, but this was fabulous. We had the VTA bus out there to give people an idea of what a bus boarding island would look like and ask people to give us some of their thoughts. It does as comfortable, do you like it? We got great input and feedback and quotes, but I wanna talk more about the other outreach that we did. So we did three rounds of outreach. Our CBO partners, the Meta LLC and Guadalupe River Conservancy and the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition did a lot of work during this time. I got a woo-woo for SCVC. So the partners distributed project information in person during the pandemic. They were really instrumental in getting feedback from communities of color and women. And they also did other things, like participating in one-on-one calls with other community groups and other CBOs and going to other local groups to inform the community about the project and listen and hear about what they said. We also held, I guess what you would call your standard public meeting. We did three of them on Zoom. We got 131 people who attended those, all told those three meetings. In comparison, our CBO partners had one-on-one conversations with people in person with 1,711 people. So much, much better than our standard Zoom surveys. In terms of key successes, Meta and Guadalupe River Conservancy handed out over 400 flyers during the pandemic to point people to our meetings and also to point people to the online survey. We had them help people fill out the online survey. Meta actually distributed flyers in person at diaper and food distribution sites during the pandemic, meeting people where they were and having conversations with people to help them talk to them about how to make it relevant to their lives. They had to really think about how can I make this relevant to this person in front of me? So we also were tracking the demographics of who was submitting surveys as it was happening and it would take the CBOs a little bit of time to ramp up and get their work going. And so we would have kind of like a pre and then as soon as they started doing their work we could see that the demographics started shifting and started shifting more closely to align with the demographics of the community. All right. So this is the final Central Bikeway study. This is our little transit map style. It is a 10 mile alignment. It is entirely on street. We looked at alternatives that were off and almost entirely off street, partially off street. And then this one, which happened to be entirely on street. It connects to three CalTrain stations, two VTA light rail stations, the various BART station, the Future Santa Clara BART station, the three trails. You can get to Santa Clara University, Japan Town, the earthquake stadium. Compared to the other alignments, it has the shortest travel time, even accounting for needing to go through singles. And it scores really, really well on connectivity and getting people to where they wanna go. But where it doesn't score as well is in this metric of joy and giving people a trail-like experience because people did say they prefer trails. I prefer trails. So, but when we looked at all of those scoring criteria all together, this one came up, even despite the fact that it does, it currently looks like this. This is El Camino Real, is a CalTrain this road in Santa Clara. So what do we do to fix it? Well, we have, we put together as part of the study to have a percent designs for the whole corridor. This is a concept of what it could look like on El Camino Real. We have a improved bus stop, a bikeway. So what we're planning, what we're proposing on El Camino is to remove the parking, pull the curb line out into the street and do a raised bikeway that is separated from the pedestrians in traffic, but it's at the sidewalk level. You can see some of the things that Sergio and Mauricio mentioned like wayfinding, signage and whatnot on here. And one of the big challenges is how to deal with the driveways here. So we have designs that help minimize some of the conflict points between bicyclists and drivers at the driveways. So you can see on the bottom left, there's kind of where you are on the corridor. It's on El Camino for about half it, half the distance and then it hits San Jose and it turns and it goes through more of a residential and smaller business area streets. So this is Heading Street in San Jose. There's currently a bike lane with a painted buffer there and this is proposing to harden that, put in like landscaping. You can see a protected intersection. We believe that on Heading Street, we think you could do some single timing to do bike priority. So the signal would either stay green longer to let you through or turn green as you're approaching the signal. Finally, concept design on Taylor Street. So Taylor already has a quick build two way separated bikeway on it and we're proposing to extend that. So here the bikeway is at street level. This is an example of what it could look like at the intersection of a side street. So the bikeway and the motor vehicle way, they're both raised. So it's basically a tabled intersection and the idea there is to indicate to the drivers and the pedestrians and the bicyclists. This is a conflict point. You need to slow down. You need to be careful and maybe not eliminate all the conflict points but at least make it so that if there is a conflict, it will be less severe and hopefully not severe at all. So, wow, this is awesome. How much is it gonna cost? I don't wanna go to the next slide. This is a transformational project. There we go. We think it's gonna be about $213 million to do. This is 10 miles of bikeway and what we're proposing to do is completely rebuild the outer portions of 10 miles of streets. This means utility realignments. It means we're putting protected intersections through the whole area. It means some of it is Caltrans right of way. There's actually, it goes through a minor freeway interchange and so we would be realigning the freeway ramps to make them squared up and signalized. So there's a ton of work but we are looking for funding. So the next step, yeah, we'll do a bake sale. I know, I'll say a little, I'll just say the next step is VTA. At the high levels of VTA, we have gotten permission to seek funding for the environmental clearance of this project. And so we think that's about $27 million. I should at least say internally, we do need to go to our board of directors. But we will be looking for funding to do that. And then once that is done, we imagine that it will probably be developed in segments and some segments can happen a lot faster than others. And the last thing I wanted to say about the price here, I think you need to think about this is not a bike project, but a completely transformational project. This is turning these roads into complete streets. This is akin to building a bus rapid transit system or extending some sort of transit way. It's like building a few freeway interchanges and why can't we invest this much money in biking, right? So that's where I come from. Great, thanks Lauren. You make a great point. We have to stop thinking about bicycling and bike infrastructure as just being bike infrastructure and as changes to transportation. So in order to do that, when we talk about bike highways, a lot of it is intended to help people move more efficiently. And you mentioned in your presentation that it's not about speed, but rather efficiency. So as we think about that, how does that impact the way the target audiences for bike highways might be able to use it? We hear a lot about eight to 80 bicyclists, but what other sort of target audiences might there be and how does the fact that your focus is on efficiency and not speed, how might that impact people using the bike highways? You want me to start since I have this? Yeah. So we deliberately and doing outreach wanted to reach out to the communities through which this project was running. So that we could build something for them, right? Build something with them. And one of the things we are hoping this will do is actually shift the needle in terms of mode split, like in terms of getting people who currently drive to make some of those trips by bike. And so I think when you think about building something that is super high speed, 20, 25 miles per hour, that's not very inviting for new bicyclists who maybe are going much slower, don't feel comfortable with people speeding past them. There were also the challenges of in an urban environment like this, it's very difficult to build something that's physically separated from cars and still wide enough to allow like 20, 25 mile per hour bike riding. You have to make it even wider. I think we're proposing it to be seven feet wide in one way, seven feet wide, which is it'd be great if it could be wider. We are trying to do it within the constraints of the existing right of way and not take right of way. I feel like I've kind of circled around and I haven't hit the question, but did I answer it good enough? I think so, does Mauricio Sergio, do either of you have anything to add to that? Yeah, just in the context of our study, we have a stakeholder working group and we met with other stakeholders throughout the region to ask who is the desired user of what you envision a bike highway to be? And it really depends on the context and where it is and who the community are or is. I think if you're building a facility where none exists along the corridor, you wanna make sure that we open it to pedestrians and people walking and slower bicyclists. You don't want it just for bicyclists. You wanna do maybe a shared use path kind of the situation. If there's already a trail along there and you wanna just open it up for a higher speed bicyclist, that's another story or situation. So I think it really depends and once you get to the corridor level, you really have to engage with the community to see what the needs are along the corridor and who we wanna serve and then you can go from there. So there's no easy answer, I don't think, at least not at this point. I think also looking at international examples, you can see that each of the bikeways really changes when the context is different, when the land users are different. So you're going a little bit slower when you're in downtown, there's more people, there's less separation, it's a little bit tighter. And yes, you can see our faces like, I don't have the pointer right now. What's the pointer? Cool. See, some of the different typologies here, they change basically based on the land users. So I think it depends, as everybody has said, I just wanted to kind of highlight that there are examples already and they're being used differently in different places. All right, great. So we're gonna go ahead and open this up for Q&A. So raise your hand and I'll pass you the mic. We'll start up here. Thank you all for a brilliant presentation. This is a super exciting project to see. I was hoping to hear maybe why Sunnyvale and Mountain View weren't at the table here or why the project is extended further into the county. So to give everyone context, if you don't know Santa Clara County, El Camino Real goes all the way from San Jose, all the way up to San Francisco. The next city in Santa Clara County after Santa Clara is Sunnyvale and then Mountain View and then Palo Alto. So when we were actually going for the Cal Trans Planning Grant to do the study, we reached out to, I originally reached out to all of those cities to see if they wanted to be involved. Sunnyvale was in the middle of developing their active transportation plan and they were like, we can't do it right now because we're in the middle of this big planning effort and we don't even know what we would wanna do on El Camino. So they declined and then I found out that separately Palo Alto, Mountain View, Palo Alto and other cities to the north were going for the same planning grant to do basically the same thing. So unfortunately they didn't get the grant and we did even though we both submitted letters of support. That said, there are efforts in all of those cities looking at putting at the very least a protected bikeway on El Camino or I should say the very least bike lanes on El Camino. So Sunnyvale has a very small section of bike lanes currently Mountain View and you might not be able to talk a little bit more about Mountain View. Mountain View is working with Caltrans to actually install separated bikeways with the next repaving. Do you wanna? Yeah, just real quick. I think El Camino is kind of a unique situation but I'm sure there are other examples in the state where it's a state highway that crosses a lot of jurisdictions. They each have their own timeframe in terms of the planning, specific plans and whatever else ends up informing what they wanna see on a state highway corridor such as that. So I think there's still a need for like a regional planning approach along there that hasn't happened yet. It could be at the county level, it could be at the district, Caltrans district level. I think we're still kind of struggling with that but I think we're at a point where enough of the jurisdictions are getting that support and I think Mountain View is a good example where they're gonna be next in line and actually getting separated bikeways and Redwood City is a little bit behind them but they're also kind of in line to get separated bikeways and Santa Clara, the city of Santa Clara where funding separated bikeways but more as a pan plastic approach, not so much the bike highway vision that we have so maybe that's part of the phasing potentially but it's not addressing the whole corridor or corridor wide across jurisdictions so I think there still needs to be that extra step I think to really have that connection. I do wanna highlight though and this is update for everybody if you don't know there is already the peninsula bikeway it's a provisional route that goes all the way from Redwood City to Mountain View and I was lucky enough to work on the kind of next steps of the peninsula bikeway looking into different feasibility routes and they all came together to kind of look into El Camino that was done through the managers mobility partnership and so I know that Mountain View is moving forward with El Camino with some separated portions and the other jurisdictions are looking into it. I think the difficulty in El Camino in particular and some of the jurisdictions is the need for parking but that is a different story, yeah. Yeah, hi, just recently, I love a lot of what I saw certainly this is really exciting. The class four bothered me a little bit because I've never been on a class four that I felt comfortable over 15 miles an hour or so but if those are real urban areas that would be, you know, maybe I understood but in Encinitas, North County, San Diego they recently put in a class four along a long stretch of the PCH and the club cyclists, they hated it. They didn't wanna be there at all because you do have people walking you have people slower and they're going 24, 26 miles an hour. So they got the city to put in shadows and bikes may use full lane for that right travel lane. So there is a way and in California there is no mandatory use of class four which is why they shouldn't be called bike lanes because class two, there is a mandatory law although there are many exceptions to that. So by calling them separated bike lanes it should be bike way but anyway, so anybody can use the travel lane next to a class four but it would be in places where you want the higher speed cyclists and e-bikes at 25 that may be something that you could add particularly in what you're planning to do there and that doesn't cost virtually anything to add. It's just science. Thank you Lauren for your presentation. I work for the city of San Jose and I'm wondering what cities along the bike way can do right now and in the coming years to support this effort. Thank you. I think what I would like to see cities is particularly San Jose has a I mean, you know this San Jose has a fabulous integration of their pavement management and their bike, their bike plan. And so if anyone here wants to know how to do it talk to people in the city of San Jose because they are putting in many, many miles of bike lanes at with repaving and it's not actually as easy as you might think it would be. It takes a lot of advanced planning. So I would actually like to see cities whenever they're making changes as a street being consistent with the planning efforts that they have and consistent with the central bike way. Sometimes that's hard if you're only doing a small segment you can't put a separated bike way you could maybe do it in one block but it's not ideal. The other thing is if you have redevelopment happening make sure as a condition of redevelopment that development puts in or at least reserves the space for the bike way. That's really important because you don't want a new thing built and then you lost your opportunity. Those are my two main thoughts. Also let your elected officials I mean, I city staff don't do this but let the elected officials know about great projects that you like that you want to see move forward because that helps get things going. I would just add in this I tell to every single one of my clients act locally but think regionally. And that is one of the biggest problems that we have here in the Bay areas that we act very much locally and unfortunately our plans don't take us to the region. Thank you to the folks that have started thinking about the region. But yeah, just because at jurisdiction ends here the way that we as bicyclists go from one place to another doesn't just end theirs. So act locally and think regionally as well. I see a challenge and an opportunity that are the same thing. And I wanna thank you Lauren for touching on the joy and the attractiveness and along with that is climate and not siloing functions. And so the opportunity for stormwater capture shade I'm doing consulting work for LA County the chief sustainability office did a climate vulnerability assessment that really focused on heat. And it would be a shame to invest all those dollars without also solving all these other problems at the same time that are urgently need to be solved. And so these could also be not just bike superhighways but oasis seas for communities to sit in the shade to cool down entire communities and at the same time to take care of the catastrophic water issues that California and others are experiencing. Thank you. I appreciate that and I think we've had some conversations about that and we can do more to integrate it in. And I love the idea of having bike oasis seas or just a community oasis seas along the bike superhighway as resting points. I'll only add that, we hear the same thing from our stakeholders and our local partners all the time about thinking more than just a bike facility. It is a challenge and from Caltrans perspective it's very difficult because we own and operate the state highway system across the state. So it's a lot of maintenance resources that just aren't there. So if we find opportunities where we can partner with local jurisdictions or other organizations on the maintenance end I think that's a really good opportunity. So it's not something that we've been able to solve on our end, unfortunately. I know there's a location along some public avenue where they test a different stormwater treatments and one of them included a separated bikeway. So we can point to those examples at least to test as a proof of concept. But I think it's definitely a good thing to keep in mind. Hi, I'm Kathy Leonard from Oakland. Speaking of regionally, right now San Pablo is, there's some work that's planned on San Pablo Avenue between Oakland, Emoryville and Berkeley. But what about the rest of the San Pablo stretch? There's about 10 or more cities that San Pablo Avenue runs through. Are there any plans to connect those cities? I could see if there's a connection there. A lot of that traffic on highway 880 being alleviated by having bike traffic going all alongside of 880. Thank you. I can speak to that a little bit. There is an effort that was sponsored by Alameda CTC that looked at both counties because it does span Alameda County and then Contra Costa County as well. So they did the planning level assessment and recommendations. In terms of implementation, I know their first phase is only looking at the lower section between from Oakland to just past the border of Berkeley sort of as a demonstration project. I don't know what the status is of like a second phase or what the timeframe would be. But I know there's interest in Berkeley as well to extend it there. And then I know Albany and El Cerrito are also pursuing different projects along the corridor. But it's almost, it becomes a situation like El Camino Reo where it becomes like a patchwork of improvements. So I think having that continuity and making it really like a bike highway type facility is needed. It would be very beneficial. And there are also some other priorities like transit and walking pedestrian safety that need to be looked at as well. Yeah, so north of 580, it is a state highway up until a part of Richmond that becomes a local street again. So it is a state highway. And so we do have a stake on that corridor on what happens. So yeah, I'm supportive of that for sure. We look at it as an opportunity. We have our bike plan in our district for region that does indicate the need for a continuous bikeway along the corridor. But what that ends up looking like we have to work with our partner agencies on that and the details are kind of the issue I think. I want to ask about finding right away which seems like for your project was like a massive issue. And it seems to me that that's really at the heart of making a super highway is like, where the hell do you put it? So to what extent would there be the ability to reclaim older right-of-way that was surrendered to roadway, right? Because I know that there was some rail right-of-way that was surrendered to paved road. And to what extent can Caltran support the securing the kind of right-of-way necessary? Like what are the issues there? What are the opportunities there generally just around right-of-way for doing this stuff? I have to admit that's slightly beyond my area of expertise. So I don't know quite how to answer that. I don't know if you have experience working in right-of-way or... I don't have experience working in right-of-way. I can tell you from when we developed the county-wide bike plan which was the predecessor to the bike super highway which came out of that. We asked our consultant to take a look at right-of-way opportunities like you were talking about to see if we could build any continuous bikeways. And what they found is it's really piecemeal. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges at least in our county is it's been so developed that you can only get little bits. So it may be a good local connection but maybe not for bike super highway. I don't think we wanna... I don't think we wanna tear down houses to build bikeways. I know. I can't talk about Bogota how Trans Milenio was actually implemented and a lot of Trans Milenio is the BRT there. In Bogota, everything came together at the same time. So within 10 years, you did not see anything in the middle connecting the north to the south. And the administration that built most of Trans Milenio literally did everything in 10 years. And they not only looked just at BRT but the connections to BRT, how to connect through BRT. And so those are opportunities. They basically are available right away and they did have to buy some right away. But that was a great implementation. Of course, planning is done very differently in South America. So there are some issues there to be looked at but that was a great example of what to do and how to do it fast and easy. I avoided answering because I don't wanna speak out of my expertise but I will say in an area like the Bay Area, it's very built out, San Jose, especially, we have to start thinking more about reallocating existing right-of-way and not so much building out further. And that's where we have to start thinking of what the trade-offs are, if it requires parking lanes or travel lanes and really looking at ourselves and what our priorities are as an agency and who we wanna serve as a community. And then if that's not the case and you're in a more rural area and you have to buy right-of-way and it's still owned by someone, it just basically equates to more dollars, more expense. So we have some trail projects in the Bay Area that are just very expensive because of that because they have to acquire right-of-way. It's easier sometimes for the counties or cities to do it than Caltrans but it's still very expensive regardless. Yeah, so thank you. I wanted to ask Lauren about, when you had the slide about the cost. And that's a big number and I'm curious, like obviously everyone in this room believes it's worth the investment but how do you better message that to the public when I look at a number like 200 and some a million and you say there's a utility work and the realignment kind of reminds me of the narrative around the Van Ness bus project that, oh, it's just some paint on the road and rebuilding the road, why does it cost this much money? How can we better message these projects to the general public so they don't get dismissed as a wasteful project and you start to sell the value of that. So maybe I flip that around and ask the audience who has a lot of bike advocates who are really skilled at messaging things like this. So I am not an expert in messaging. One of my initial thoughts is we would have to talk about it less as a bike project and more as a transformation of the street. It's a complete street for everyone. It's gonna improve conditions for pedestrians. It's gonna improve conditions for bicyclists. It'll improve conditions for people who use transit and it won't really disrupt people who drive. We're actually not taking a traveling, we're taking some parking but we're not taking a traveling at least in this current design but yeah, I would wanna flip that around and ask the advocates what they thought like what's the best messaging strategy for that? Do we wanna try and get some answers cause we're a little low on time? Or you can talk to me afterwards. One of those slides you had right before boasted I think rightfully that your outreach has improved a lot and that you had 30% of people who weren't cyclists which is a dismal number in reality, right? Like if the stated goal is to say this is a transformational project we had 74% of the people who were gonna ride it anyway, right? They were like cyclists, they were into it, they want it and it's like you almost wanna take that 70% and chuck it and like keep that progress because it used to be like even worse, right? You're like making progress but like get that challenge exactly answers that, right? About being able to reach if you got the other, if you flipped it, if 70% of the people who are answering those score you getting into the right rooms to say, hey, like let's really get fresh input into this then I think, yeah, then you'll have this project that people see and say, hey, that's for me. And actually just real quick thinking about it I think it's also not necessarily the agency's job to market something because it really should be something that the community really wants and provide opportunities for the community to support it and say we really want this. So we've worked with the community to develop this I hope that it moves forward, we'll do more outreach when we do the environmental work a lot of outreach and see where that takes us. I would also say it probably also depends on what the funding sources because maybe you are not necessarily competing with other potential projects that are affecting that same community it could be part of a statewide or federal program where otherwise that community wouldn't see those dollars at all. So that could be a part of the messaging but that really depends on the situation. Hi, also on the same vein as the previous speaker's comment about the 213 million is there such thing as a quick build super highway? And if so, is there a way to build out all of the 17 networks now with minimal equipment and funding and just localize it on like intersection treatments? Is there something like that in your view? That's an interesting idea and maybe we should think about it. I think at least on El Camino, I think putting down a paint and plastic physically protected bikeway is going to be okay but definitely not a bike super highway. You really need to do the protected intersections. You really, I think having a sidewalk level bikeway just improves the comfort and the safety so much more than what you could do in quick build. You could do on the other section of, you know Heading Street and Taylor you probably could do a decent job with quick build. So I think it's dependent on where it is. There's also areas on that map that are trails. So you can't do quick build trails but yeah. I think I'll look at it and see if there's opportunities. Thanks for that idea. All right, this will be our last question. Thank you speakers. So my question is we've been talking a lot about bike highways being a regional treatment which totally makes sense. But my question for you is do you think there's a space for them to be implemented by cities as a part of their bike plans or active transportation plans? Specifically large geographically spread out cities like California has a time, Fresno, San Jose, San Diego. Cause I'm thinking one of the largest complaints that I see about ATPs or bike plans is that they're very each street is identified or is analyzed kind of individually based on its speeds and its volume. So to get from one side of the city to the other the proposed network may make you ride a class two bike lane and then switch to a class four protected bike lane and then switch to a class three bike Boulevard which is fine for a very confident or experienced bicyclist but for targeting that group of maybe people who would ride but don't currently they wouldn't do that because it's not convenient it requires a lot of knowledge. So I'm curious if super high or bike highways would be a tool to achieve that consistency that may encourage more people to ride at a more local level. I'll start, but I wanna hand it over to Mauricio cause he does a lot of bike planning. I think that every city should have a low stress network for bikeways that they've identified that's cohesive and it could be called a bike highway network. It could be built to that level but I think even just having like you said the same level of stress or lack of stress on the bike way and make it continuous would be really important. Yeah. I think there's already some examples. First of all, the answer is yes, period. And there are some examples, particularly in the peninsula and the peninsula includes San Francisco went down. Mountain View is moving forward with that type of protected facility that connects over to the next step which would be that's Palo Alto, then what is that Menlo Park and then Atherton. They're all kind of working together. It really does take a lot of regional planning but every city is implementing it the same way or that's the hope. So yeah, there are some really good examples and the answer is yes, they can do that. All right, well, let's give a round of applause to our speakers and thank you all very much for coming.