Tonight, at 6pm, there is a joint community meeting hosted by Caltrans and Palo Alto to get feedback on the plan for repaving El Camino Real and adding protected bike lanes.
We can expect that there will be plenty of people on “both sides”. Those sides are defined as “drivers who desperately don’t want to give up an inch” vs. “cyclists and pedestrians who just don’t want to be killed there”.
As you might guess, I will be representing the latter.
We can also expect the usual display of cycling fallacies to be trotted out by the people who support more cars forever. There’s apparently even a bingo card on PDF that you can download from that site, but it wasn’t working today.
I am continually reminded that this sort of change takes a long time, but it’s starting to feel like a chore to attend these things as a cycling advocate because they all sound the same.
We can hope that Palo Alto gets on board and fully supports the efforts of Caltrans to put in protected bike lanes.