Check out the attached video that shows the issues of a San Luis Obispo Parent riding with his son to School.
We as a city need to consider and create solutions for this. City staff are aware of this stretch and the issues I believe… and are already working to create small changes for greater safety as quickly as possible… but the real change will come only when enough parents and other cyclists show up at City Council meetings to convince Council of the need and the priority.
That is kind of an absurd route to take to get to the school. In the video, you don’t show what happens once you actually get to Lincoln, but I’m presuming you go up to Foothill? At some point you certainly have to cross Santa Rosa. This doesn’t even make sense. You said he goes to Pacheco, right? Why not just take Johnson to San Luis Drive and only take California to Palm St., which is a very short distance (2-3 blocks) on the slower part of California.. and then take Palm over to Grande Ave, where Pacheco is? What am I missing?
After thinking about this a little more, I realize that your goal here is not to get your child to school more safely, but to provide a reasonable *sounding* argument for more bike paths and better routes. I am 100% agreement with your cause, but there are tons of reasonable arguments without having to shroud a disingenuous argument in a cute feel-good someone-think-of-the-children video. This is the most ludicrous way to get to Pacheco Elementary that I could imagine. The route I described is infinitely safer and shorter.
So often these days I find that I agree with the goals of someone, only to find the logic of how they got there and their tactics to be quite dishonest. I fully appreciate the fact that automobile, tire, and oil companies have managed to use all kinds of manipulative psychological tactics, political maneuvers, and propaganda over the years to ensure that we continue to subsidize them via the building of roads. But over the long haul, the only way to improve our world is to maintain our integrity, everything else leads to self-defeat via the paradoxes created. We really need to return integrity and legitimate rational thinking to the realm of the public employee.
Perhaps I am way off base here and you simply arrived at your argument through some sort of thinking that you have become accustomed to as a planner in the public sphere. I would be very interested in your response to my assertions here. I’m honestly very curious how you came to view this argument as one that made sense.
not my video… it was just forwarded to me. I just think we need to build bike routes all over town… with specific emphasis on getting kids to school.