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Ambitious plan would transform downtown streets

Cars will have to share downtown San Diego’s streets much more evenly with bicyclists and pedestrians under an ambitious new plan that aims to boost safety and fight climate change.

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Cars will have to share downtown San Diego’s streets much more evenly with bicyclists and pedestrians under an ambitious new plan that aims to boost safety and fight climate change.

The long-term plan, which the City Council unanimously approved on Tuesday, would transform many vehicle lanes and some on-street parking into miles of protected cycling lanes and pedestrian promenades.

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It aims to reverse an oversight by city planners decades ago, when they designed downtown’s streets with travel lanes only for cars and sidewalks only for pedestrians — leaving bicycles out of the equation.

San Diego is joining a growing list of cities trying to revamp their streets to make cycling safer and more convenient, primarily because more bicycle commuting is considered crucial to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

“The public owns our streets,” said Stephen Haase, vice-chairman of the San Diego Planning Commission. “It’s time to give pedestrians and cyclists equal priority with the almighty car.”

The plan, called the Downtown Mobility Plan, has met some resistance from community leaders over locations of some protected cycling lanes and lost parking spots.

City officials stress that the routes chosen are the most ideal based on safety, convenience, connectivity and minimizing lost parking.

They also note that the plan actually increases downtown parking spaces in its first 10 years thanks to hundreds of parallel parking spots being converted to angled parking.

Parking would decrease by 477 spots over the 30-year duration of the plan, but that’s a relatively small portion of the roughly 9,000 spots downtown has right now.

“Change is quite terrifying to people,” Councilman Todd Gloria said during Tuesday’s public hearing on the plan. “Hearings like this have happened all across the country as we try to de-carbonize our economy and give people more transportation choices.”

The plan, which would cost $62.5 million over 30 years, is supported by the local business community.

“The efficiency of our transportation network is directly connected to the efficiency of our economy,” said Sean Karafin, executive director of policy and economic research for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The plan would also help the city achieve some goals in the ambitious Climate Action Plan the council adopted last year.

The plan requires the number of people bicycling to work in the city’s densely populated neighborhoods to increase from about 2 percent to 6 percent by 2020 and then to 18 percent by 2035. Some skeptics are doubtful that goal can be met.

Nicole Capretz, the primary author of the city’s Climate Action Plan and the executive director of the nonprofit Climate Action Campaign, said the mobility plan is a big step because downtown is a crucial part of San Diego that sets the tone for other neighborhoods.

“This is an incredible moment for our city,” she said.

Another environmental group, however, said the plan doesn’t focus enough on boosting mass transit in downtown, which has several trolley stops and serves as the endpoint of several express bus routes.

“We want to thank you for the fantastic bike and walk components of the plan, but unfortunately this plan is a disaster,” said Jana Clark, secretary of the Cleveland National Forest Foundation. “A mobility plan without transit is not a mobility plan.”

City officials have said transit upgrades, while important, are not within the scope of the mobility plan.

The focus has instead been on cycling routes, said Brad Richter, assistant vice president of planning at Civic San Diego.

“We have very limited bicycle infrastructure in the downtown area,” Richter said. “Either people don’t feel safe bicycling or they ride on our public sidewalks, which creates safety hazards.”

Richter said the city’s plan borrowed concepts tried successfully in New York City, Seattle, Long Beach and Washington, D.C.

Those include cycle tracks, where one lane of the street is segregated from the rest to create a safe space for cyclists that is free of pedestrians and vehicles.

Sometimes cycle tracks are created by converting one travel lane of a street into parking and locating the cycle track between a row of parked cars and the sidewalk. Other times, travel lanes are narrowed to create space for a cycle track.

In downtown, the planned north-south cycle tracks would be on Pacific Highway, State Street, Sixth Avenue and Park Boulevard. The east-west cycle tracks would be on Beech Street, Broadway, J Street and small parts of B and C streets.

Richter said Calgary has quickly seen remarkable results from similar changes it made last summer. There has been a 95 percent increase in daily bike trips and sidewalk cycling has decreased from 17 percent to 3 percent.

Andy Hanshaw, executive director of the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, said the changes would benefit everyone, not just avid cyclists.

“This network will serve all residents, employees and tourists,” said Hanshaw, noting that the downtown cycle tracks were strategically placed to connect to bike paths in surrounding cities and communities.

The plan also includes some “greenways,” or pedestrian promenades where a road lane previously used for parking or travel would become a landscaped area designed for pedestrians and socializing. One greenway is planned for 14th Street near Broadway, and another would be on Sixth Avenue between downtown and Balboa Park.

Kathleen Ferrier of the pedestrian advocacy group Circulate San Diego praised the plan.

“It will improve mobility choices by what we call ‘right sizing’ the streets — by using the extra capacity that exists now for cars to make way for people walking and biking,” she said. “It will improve safety and get more people out of their cars and on their feet and their bicycles.”

While cars would have less space on many downtown streets, the plan wouldn’t reduce travel lanes on important arterial roads such as Harbor Drive, Market Street, Park Boulevard and streets that directly handle traffic flow from Interstate 5, state Route 163 and state Route 94.

The cycling upgrades would eliminate 331 parking spots during the plan’s first three years, but the number of downtown spots would actually increase by 469 during that time frame because a projected 600 spots will be gained from switching parallel parking spots to angled parking spots and a parking structure planned for the East Village would add 200 more spots.

During years three through 10 of the plan, 242 spots would be lost to the greenways and pedestrian promenades, but the plan would still have a net positive of 227 spots.

In years 11 through 30, another 700 spots would be lost to cycling and pedestrian improvements, making the overall impact of the plan a loss of 477 spots.

Kris Michell, chief executive of the Downtown San Diego Partnership, said the parking loss prevented her group from endorsing the plan beyond the first 10 years. In addition, she said city officials should focus on replacing lost parking spots with new spots in the same general area, not just on downtown’s overall total number of spots.

For details on the plan, visit downtownsdmobility.com.

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