Advocacy Win Bike Lanes Extended On Butterfield Road

In addition to leading our own campaigns, MCBC frequently works with neighborhood groups to achieve their goals around safer streets for biking and walking. One great example is Butterfield Road in San Anselmo and Sleepy Hollow. Thanks in part to MCBC’s support, the community now has nearly a mile and a half of new bike lanes! Read about how the Bike Lane has been extended on Butterfield Road.

Background

Since 2021, MCBC staff have been actively participating in the Butterfield Road Safety Committee. The road is home to three schools and is an important bicycling access route to Terra Linda via Fawn Drive. But previously it did not have bike lanes north of the town/county line. As detailed in this post, MCBC helped break a logjam by developing, promoting, and analyzing a community survey that demonstrated much more support for removing on-street parking and providing a bike lane on Butterfield than expected. Thanks in part to our work, San Anselmo widened their bike lanes (Sir Francis Drake Blvd. to Oak Knoll Dr.). Bike lanes were added in the county segment by simply enforcing an existing prohibition on parking.

This year, the committee evaluated the new bike lanes and discussed extending them to San Domenico at the end of Butterfield Road. 

A new survey addressing both issues was launched in July and received over 400 responses:

• A majority of respondents indicated that the new bike lanes improve their sense of safety
• A substantial majority (roughly 80%) of respondents expressed support for extending the bike lanes to the end of Butterfield. This support held at similar levels for various subsets of people, including residents who live on the Butterfield corridor and members of the Sleepy Hollow Homes Association (SHHA)
• While some residents found that parking was more difficult, this was expressed by roughly ⅙ th of respondents, even when selecting only SHHA members

For anyone interested in reading the full survey report, that document can be found here. 

A community meeting was held on September 13th to report on these findings and allow members of the neighborhood to ask follow-up questions. Click here to watch the recording. The meeting was well-attended, with an appearance from Marin County Supervisor Nancy Rice. At its conclusion, County engineer John Neville said that the DPW could move forward with extending the bike lane to the end of Butterfield Road.

The Vote

On Tuesday, November 28th, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to extend the bike lane from its current terminus at Sleepy Hollow Drive to the end of Butterfield Road, cementing the work that the community has been pursuing for years. 

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Supervisor Katie Rice and her aide Nancy Vernon, both of whom were instrumental to the project. We thank the Sleepy Hollow Homes Association and members of the Safety Committee who volunteered their time to work for a safer Butterfield Road. And lastly, we appreciate the dozens of people who wrote public comments to the Board of Supervisors to express their support for the extension of bike lanes. 

Ortlieb Bag Raffle

To incentivize people to fill out the survey, we offered a free Ortlieb bag to one lucky respondent. It went to Barry Ulrich, who picked it up this week. Congratulations!

Next Steps

With this direction from the Board of Supervisors, the Marin County Department of Public Works will install “No Parking” signs on the roadway shoulder between Sleepy Hollow Drive and San Domenico, formalizing the bike lane. 

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