Cycling advocates and government officials touted major new ideas to make streets safer Thursday at the California Bicycle Summit 2024, which downtown San Diego is hosting this week.
Ideas included cameras that could stop speeding vehicles without a police officer present, a new state law making it easier for cities to lower speed limits, and technology that limits the speed of vehicles driven by police. municipal employees.
Although protected bike lanes and other bicycle-focused solutions have also received attention, most ideas have prioritized reducing motor vehicle speeds so that collisions with bicycles are less common – and less deadly.
Local towns will also soon receive help boosting bike safety from the county’s regional planning agency, which is identifying high-risk areas for cyclists and pedestrians in its first regional action plan “zero vision”.
Vision Zero is a traffic safety policy concept adopted by 90 U.S. cities, including San Diego, that aims to reduce traffic deaths to zero, even if it slows traffic.
The agency, the San Diego Association of Governments, is creating two maps as part of the action plan. One map shows where accidents have typically occurred in the past, while the other attempts to guess where they will occur in the future.
The first map shows that just 6.1 percent of local, non-motorway roads account for more than half of fatal crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
“It’s a little more reactive approach,” said Sam Sanford, SANDAG senior regional planner.
The second map shows the locations that have the most risk factors that typically predict accidents, such as the number of lanes and proximity to apartment complexes or commercial districts.
Sanford said the agency is also gathering public input, including through an online survey in which nearly 3,000 people identified potentially dangerous intersections.
He said the tool could be useful in helping cities uncover issues that city officials aren’t aware of.
“The public may say ‘we don’t feel safe,’ ‘there’s a gap in the network,’ ‘we’d like another facility here,'” Sanford said.
SANDAG also included input from community organizations familiar with the needs of different resident groups that government agencies struggle to reach.
Sanford said SANDAG ensures that drivers of the six vehicles owned by his agency always follow speed limits through a technology called speed management. If local towns and school districts follow suit, it could increase security, he said.
“On a large enough scale, this could have a big impact,” he said. “There are probably close to 100,000 vehicles in this county. If they had active speed management in their vehicles, we would see a critical mass of vehicles actually respecting speed limits.
Other anti-speeding efforts have been touted by Anar Salayev, executive director of Bike San Diego, a nonprofit.
Salayev said his organization is working with San Diego city officials to help the city take advantage of AB 43, a 2022 law that allows local agencies to reduce speed limits in most areas by 5 mph and set speed limits of 20 to 25 mph in certain commercial and residential areas if they use data to declare those areas as safety corridors.
Council members Stephen Whitburn and Raul Campillo’s staff are exploring areas where lowering speed limits might make sense, Salayev said. These efforts include seeking public input.
“They’re polling voters on streets they don’t feel safe on, streets they think might need additional speed reductions,” he said.
City officials have also begun painting curbs red near some intersections because of AB 413, a law that took effect in January that prohibits parking within 20 feet of an intersection — 15 feet if the intersection has an extended curb.
This law aims to improve safety by increasing the visibility of drivers, pedestrians and others at crosswalks and intersections – a practice known as daylighting.
Salayev also praised AB 645, which created a pilot program allowing six cities – three in Los Angeles County and three in the Bay Area – to use cameras to write speeding tickets. speed.
“We would love to see this rolled out in the San Diego area,” he said.
Other workshops at the Bike Summit, held every two years in a different part of the state, included joint rides on San Diego’s new protected lanes, how buses and bikes can coexist and new trends in road design.
The event, hosted by the Wyndham Bayside on Harbor Drive, began Wednesday evening and ends Friday.
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