San Diego Claims Space for Biking With Its First Road Diet

San Diego certainly has the right kind of climate to be a great biking city. But its streets — wide, fast, scary — have been holding it back.

That’s beginning to change. On Tuesday, the city striped two buffered bike lanes on major streets. The writers at Bike SD say it’s an important precedent for the city:

The City of San Diego completed its first road diet on Tuesday. The new buffered bike lanes run from Elm Street to Laurel along Fourth and Fifth Avenue in Bankers Hill. People were riding on them even before the paint was dry on the road. The buffered bike lanes were implemented in preparation of the upcoming bike share program. This project was originally scheduled to be completed earlier this year in January, the city’s Transportation staff tried to coordinate with SANDAG in how the project would be implemented to better prepare for the Uptown Early Action Project’s eventual implementation and hit some snags. Thankfully, those snags didn’t delay the implementation for too long.

Hopefully this is just the start for San Diego, which seems to have more than enough room for some great protected bike lanes on its streets.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Greater Greater Washington reports that bike commuting has tripled in DC since 2000. Car Free Dallas explains some easy and inexpensive steps to reduce pedestrian fatalities. And Mobilizing the Region considers how far the $1 million being spent to defend New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in the Bridgegate scandal could have gone toward making streets safer in the Garden State.