As reported, the California Bicycle Coalition held its Bike Summit in San Diego last week. The biennial event featured a satisfying mix of talking, sharing ideas, nerding out on the details of design and policy, going on city walks and bike rides, and having a lot of conversations. San Diego's downtown skyline has grown since the last CalBike summit was held there nine years ago, and so has its bike network.
And although there is always more work to do, kudos to the city for what it has already built: protected bike lanes around downtown, a more connected bike network throughout the city, and progress on a two-way bikeway in Balboa Park that transforms the experience from a death-defying freeway ride to a bucolic sweep through the park. Participants even got to walk through the fenced-off, unfinished portion of that bikeway to see what it will be like in the near future.
There were far too many sessions to cover them all. Highlights included:
Streetsblog California editor Melanie Curry has been thinking about transportation, and how to improve conditions for bicyclists, ever since commuting to school by bike long before bike lanes were a thing. She was Managing Editor at the East Bay Express, editor of Access Magazine for the University of California Transportation Center, and earned her Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley.
Cities and municipalities with larger budgets and staff are more likely to win competitive federal infrastructure grants, the Urban Institute has found.
How much time does driving - and paying for driving - take up? Second best safety fixes are better than none; High-speed rail station plans for Fresno; More