Making Richmond Street safer for vulnerable users
El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll received a letter from a neighbor of Richmond Street expressing concerns about the impact of losing on-street parking on vulnerable residents such as seniors and those with disabilities. The following is a response written by Steve Price, a member of the ECRA Walk & Roll coordinating committee:
Dear Neighbor:
Thank you for your letter expressing concern about pedestrian and child safety on Richmond Street. El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll strongly share your commitment to making our streets safer for vulnerable users.
This is exactly why we support bike lanes on Richmond Street. Ideally, we want protected bike lanes on Richmond Street, but we stand firm that we want significant traffic calming improvements and safety improvements for bicycle travel. Telling bicycle riders that they should just use the Ohlone Greenway for their travel in town is like telling motorists that they should be happy with one good street. People bicycle to get places. Anyone living east of Richmond Street and wants to go to the swimming pool, community center, Cerrito Vista Park, El Cerrito High School, Korematsu School, Castro Park, or the recycling center must bicycle on Richmond Street because the north/south streets east of Richmond Street are blocked by the Rose Park condominium complex and the PG&E substation. The Ohlone Greenway is way out of the way and simply doesn’t deliver bicycle riders to those destinations. And it certainly is not in the interests of the disabled to tell them to use the greenway as their only route of travel in town. Electric wheelchair users will use the bike lanes.
People hop in their car to get to designations that are nearby. Famous research by Donald Appleyard at UC Berkeley showed that the greater the automobile volumes on a street the less likely that residents there will get to know their neighbors. By encouraging mobility by other than automobiles social interaction improves. Living in a world where people’s only experience their street walking just feet from their front door to a car parked at the curb undermines community.
When streets are designed with separated spaces for different users, injury crashes typically drop by 40–50% for everyone — including seniors, pedestrians, the disabled, and drivers. Bike lanes naturally calm traffic and reduce speeding. This happens because separating different types of road users creates more predictable, calmer streets.
On-street parking is not going away on Richmond Street with bike lanes; there will be about half of what's currently there in the section north of Moeser, and the city's parking occupancy study showed that in this area no more than about 40% of the parking is currently being used (with variations block by block). Every residence on Richmond Street has a private driveway (it's required by law). That means that almost every homeowner with a garage and driveway can park at least two cars. And for a short walk, there is additional parking available down the block and on nearby side streets for guest parking. We have not advocated removing all the parking on one side of the street the length of Richmond Street.
In our society, it's a common assumption that everyone has a driver's license. But about 30% of Americans don't have one. This fact was shared by Anna Letitia Zivarts, a disabled author who wrote a book called When Driving Is Not an Option. Remember when council member Janet Abelson in her electric wheelchair had to travel in car lanes because of street designs that didn’t consider people like her? A traffic-calmed street with provision for safe travel by bikes and wheelchairs would have been a better solution for her than the way things are. But whatever type of dedicated bike lane and traffic calming is implemented, it is necessarily going to involve removing some on-street parking. When homeowners expect a parking spot right in front of their home, they're basically asking for something that millions of seniors and disabled people worldwide don't expect. I'm thinking especially of seniors in Japan, where on-street parking is almost non-existent, and in Europe, where people live in apartment buildings without curb space for parking.
Many homeowners still feel entitled to claim the curb space in front of their house. As a person living car-free and a taxpayer, I feel uncomfortable with the idea that I’m paying taxes for someone who is claiming public property for their private use. The primary purpose of streets is for travel, not car storage. While we understand the convenience of a car at the curb out front, we don't believe it should come at the expense of basic safety infrastructure.
Studies show that Baby Boomers are the main group of people who are getting onto e-bikes in the United States. I'm a senior who rides a bike, and I'm 74 years old. I know that someday I'll be using a walker. For those occasional moments when a homeowner is so frail that they can barely move beyond their front door and they live on that part of the block where a bike lane is but no parking, I would support briefly allowing a car to park to pick up that frail person if the driver was unable to park on the driveway. But it must be understood that extended parking obstructing bike lanes puts user of the lanes at risk. We need to protect the wellbeing of people throughout their lives.
In addition to bike lanes on the section north of Moeser, the project includes a variety of pedestrian-oriented traffic calming measures, including bulb-outs, chicanes, street trees, more crosswalks, pedestrian activated beacons, and the like. All these changes combined, as well as the bike lanes, are designed to slow down cars and make the street safer for all users. If street safety is the priority—seniors and children included—and El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll agrees it should be, then we need to be willing to make changes that are proven to create calmer, safer streets for all.
Best regards and stay well.
Steve Price, on behalf of
ECRA Walk & Roll coordinating committee