SAN DIEGO—
Cycling advocates and government officials touted some big new ideas to make streets safer Thursday, April 18, during the 2024 California Bicycle Summit, which downtown San Diego is hosting this week.
The ideas included cameras that can ticket speeding vehicles without a police officer present, a new state law making it easier for cities to reduce speed limits and technology limiting the speeds of vehicles driven by city workers.
While protected bike lanes and other bike-focused solutions also got some attention, most of the ideas prioritized reducing the speeds of motor vehicles so that collisions with bikes are less common — and less deadly.
Local cities will also soon get help boosting bike safety from the county’s regional planning agency, which is pinpointing high-risk areas for cyclists and pedestrians in its first region-wide “vision zero” action plan.
Vision zero is a road-safety policy concept adopted by 90 U.S. cities, including San Diego, that aims to reduce traffic deaths to zero, even if it slows down traffic.
The agency, the San Diego Association of Governments, is creating two maps as part of the action plan. One map shows where crashes have typically happened in the past, while the other tries to guess where they will happen in the future.
The first map shows that just 6.1 percent of non-freeway local roadways account for more than half of fatal crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
“It’s a little bit more of a reactive approach,” said Sam Sanford, a SANDAG senior regional planner.
The second map shows locations that have the most risk factors that typically predict crashes — such as number of lanes and proximity to apartment complexes or commercial districts.
Sanford said the agency is also gathering public input, including with an online survey where nearly 3,000 people singled out potentially dangerous intersections.
He said that tool could be valuable to help cities discover problem areas that city officials aren’t aware of.
“The public can 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-based organizations familiar with the needs of different groups of residents that government agencies struggle to reach.
Sanford said SANDAG ensures drivers of the six vehicles his agency owns always obey speed limits with a technology called speed management. If local cities and school districts follow suit, it could boost safety, he said.
“On a large enough scale, it 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 driving the speed limit.”
Other anti-speeding efforts were touted by Anar Salayev, executive director of nonprofit Bike San Diego.
Salayev said his organization is working with city of San Diego 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 to set speed limits of 20 to 25 mph in some business and residential areas if they use data to declare those areas safety corridors.
Staffers for Councilmembers Stephen Whitburn and Raul Campillo are exploring areas where dropping speed limits might make sense, Salayev said. Those efforts include seeking public input.
“They’re surveying constituents on the streets they feel unsafe on, the streets they feel could use additional speed reductions,” he said.
City officials have also started 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.
That law aims to improve safety by increasing visibility for drivers, pedestrians and others in crosswalks and intersections — a practice known as daylighting.
Salayev also praised AB 645, which created a pilot program that allows six cities — three in Los Angeles County, and three in the Bay Area — to use cameras to write speeding tickets.
“We’d love to see this deployed in the San Diego region,” he said.
Other workshops at the bike summit, which is held every two years in a different part of the state, included joint rides in San Diego’s newest protected lanes, how buses and bicycles can co-exist and new trends in road design.
The event, which is being hosted by the Wyndham Bayside on Harbor Drive, began Wednesday evening, April 17, and concludes Friday, April 20.
