Phoenix is the most dangerous city in the nation for people who walk and bike. The City Council has enacted a Complete Streets policy to try and address this, but it's not working because City Hall staff is refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue and refusing to build Complete Streets, and especially bicycle infrastructure. We demand change.

City Hall has been promising everyone bike lanes on West Roosevelt Street for a couple years now (7th Ave to 1st Ave). Plans for these bike lanes had been shown in numerous public meetings and had been formally submitted as a part of their FY2019 Pavement Maintenance Program. We even received a striping plan from them on June 12th that showed these bike lanes. This new striping was planned for after this summer's road maintenance.

But last week, we learned City Hall had quietly removed bike lanes from the W Roosevelt design because they got cold feet about removing the vehicular center turn lane.

These bike lanes were a promise to the downtown community. Their quiet removal from the design plans is a betrayal of the community's trust and we demand they be added back to the design before re-striping commences next month.

For those who follow this level of detail, and to proactively preclude the high-speed cross-sections that we've seen City Hall continue to try to use on bike projects, we'll be very clear about how W Roosevelt should be designed: There should be no center turn lane, no flared intersections, vehicular thru lanes should be exactly 10' wide (because aside from literally four buses a day between 1st & 3rd Ave there are no bus routes on this stretch of Roosevelt) and the remaining curb-to-curb space should be committed to bike lanes. Bike lanes should also be extended through intersections with intermittent green paint.

The City of Phoenix is 519 square miles. For 517 of those, the streets are designed explicitly to prioritize driving over the comfort and even safety of people who walk and bike. We don't think it's too much to ask that just TWO square miles of this city be designed to prioritize vulnerable users, those of us who rely on walking and biking to get where we need to go. The convenience of drivers is not more important than the safety of those of us who walk and bike.