Last week, at our Silicon Valley Bike Advocacy Summit, we hosted a closed session as part of our Vision Zero campaign. This was a follow up from the Stanford Trauma Bike Safety Summit in November. We thought that gathering leaders from local towns, law enforcement, and others to openly discuss their own goals to promote roadway safety would help to create a "solutions team" to work on the issues facing cyclists in our area would be productive step towards promoting roadway safety.
And productive the session was! We had high-level representatives from the following groups:
- CHP
- San Mateo and Santa Clara County Sheriff Departments
- Woodside Fire Department
- Caltrans
- DMV
- AAA
- The towns of Portola Valley, Woodside, and Los Altos Hills, and the City of Redwood City
- Stanford Trauma and Stanford Hospital
These folks joined SVBC representatives and several other bike club representatives from groups like PenVelo and Alta Velo.
The topics discussed included:
- Respect on the roadways
- Infrastructure design and maintenance and complete streets equity
- Diversion programs and other ways to bring in more education
- Ways the cycling community can model good behavior along with ways to conduct motorist outreach and education
- Effective enforcement
- Tech solutions for road hazard reporting
- Volume of recreational riders on roads versus capacity to serve and deal with potential emergencies
Perhaps most significantly, the group expressed a collective sense of ownership of the issues and agreed to meet regularly to address these topics on an ongoing basis. As we move forward, we will be able to share more details of the initiative as they take shape.
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