In the past few years, our City Council adopted a number of plans, like the Vision Zero Action Plan and the Active Transportation Plan, that call for substantial improvements around transportation. These detailed plans include prioritized project lists and timeframes aimed to achieve long-term safety, equity, and climate goals by certain dates. Annual Transportation Work Plans, like the one that’s circulating now, should check off the projects described in those plans for this year.
Unfortunately, this year’s Work Plan proposes to scale back on some key projects, most notably the Neighborhood Greenways. This scaling back, in combination with the pattern of delays we’ve seen lately, jeopardizes our long-term goals.
Bike Walk Alameda raised concerns about delays at a recent City Council meeting, and Councilmember Jensen, Councilmember Vella, and Mayor Ezzy Ashcraft asked staff to investigate what would be needed to get back on track. Staff will return with options in a few months, well after the Work Plan has been reviewed by Council, but we’re highlighting these issues now, not only because we hope they can be addressed, but because we think they support the broader, urgent case for a course correction from Council.
The 2024 Work Plan Proposes to Delay Neighborhood Greenways
The Active Transportation Plan calls for replacing the barricades on all existing Slow Streets with traffic calming infrastructure, to create our first Neighborhood Greenways, this year. But the draft 2024 Work Plan calls for only one Slow Street conversion. This pushes out the remaining conversions, and presumably the construction of the additional Greenways as well.
These Greenways are essential to our Backbone Low Stress Network, which is critical for safe, active transportation mobility, and fundamental for mode shift. This network is planned to be complete by 2030 (just six years away!), but if these kinds of delays persist, it’s extremely unlikely that this target will be hit.
Neighborhood Greenways should roll out as planned, with Slow Streets conversions this year, and the balance of Greenways delivered next year, per the ATP, without compromising other projects.
Projects like this can be complicated, take time, and sometimes face hurdles. That’s to be expected. Acknowledging this reality, and seeing delays perpetuate, should prompt City leadership to action.
“Small but Mighty” Hits Its Limit
Our small but mighty transportation staff punches above their weight, to be sure. But they have limits, and the pattern of delays we’re experiencing is evidence we’ve hit them.
The solution to getting back on track cannot be asking overburdened staff to work harder. Nor should it be a discussion around tradeoffs. We’re talking about thoroughly considered, already-prioritized projects aimed at addressing critical climate and safety imperatives. Many more people will get killed or injured on our streets, in avoidable traffic collisions, if we trade off or delay projects. The solution should be one that doesn’t forsake our established goals and targets.
We believe modest staffing reinforcements are needed. With additional staffing, more planned work could get done on time. Staff departures, which are bound to happen, won’t be as consequential. Bottlenecks around contractor management could be reduced to expand bandwidth dramatically. There might be time to improve processes that slow project delivery. Our city could more successfully apply for (and execute on) historic funding that’s available.
The City recently hired additional Public Works and Transportation staff, but much of that hiring is backfilling of positions that have been unfilled for a while. It’s unclear if the engineering deficit has been completely made up even now. But if it is, we’d expect to see projects rolling out as originally envisioned, not continuing to get pushed out.
It’s Time to Act
Many words have been said about the importance and urgency of street safety and climate action. It’s time to act on those words with appropriate investment. We’re only slightly larger than Hoboken, a city which is now in its seventh year of zero traffic fatalities! We can do it, too. But we need a course correction from our leadership now to put us on track for success.
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