After a year of outreach and refinement, San Rafael has recently released the full draft of its Citywide Bicycle/Pedestrian Plan Update. This city’s last update of the plan was in 2018, and this new plan adds some projects and re-ranks the priority of outstanding issues.
The plan adds some important projects missing in the 2018 plan, but in other areas comes up lacking. Read on to see what improvements we would like to see and learn how you can have an impact.
Progress on the 2018 Plan
Anyone familiar with San Rafael knows that a number of critical projects have been constructed since 2018. Among these are:
- Grand Avenue bike/pedestrian bridge
- SMART pathways between 2nd Street and Andersen Drive
- RSR Bridge Connections on Francisco Boulevard East and I-580 flyover
- 2nd Street two-way bikeway
- Grand Avenue two-way bikeway
While not yet constructed, the city was won funding for a number of projects that are still in development, including:
- Protected bikeways on Tamalpais Avenue in Downtown and 4th Street under US-101
- Multiuse pathways on Bellam Boulevard
- Bike/pedestrian bridge connecting the Canal neighborhood to San Rafael High School and Montecito
On the topic of policies and outcomes, the Draft 2026 plan is oddly silent. The 2018 plan made a great deal of commitments, including:
- Studying citywide ‘stop as yield’
- Updating sidewalk riding policies
- Initiate feasibility study for 4th Street
- Implement bikeway demonstration/pilot projects
- Reduce bike/ped collisions by 20% and serious/fatal crashes by 40%
This suite of commitments may have been too ambitious, but the city council and the public deserve to know where the city achieved its goals and where it came up short. Perhaps this could be the role of an appendix, but we believe the loop should be closed and these goals should not be simply forgotten about.
Safety Outcomes Not Keeping Up
In spite of San Rafael’s investments, the city continues to be an disproportionately dangerous one for walking and biking. According to the California Office of Traffic Safety, San Rafael was ranked 6/103 among cities its size (population 50k-100k) for injury collisions. No other city in that group had a greater rate of pedestrians injured, with San Rafael seeing itself in 2nd of 103 for senior pedestrians injured and 3rd of 103 for number of bicyclists. These statistics are a grim reminder of the importance of traffic safety.
While bicycle and pedestrian injury crashes peaked in 2016, 2023 and 2024 (the last years we have full data for) had more injuries than any year since the passage of the 2018 plan. Crashes where people were killed or seriously injured (called “KSI crashes”) vary from year to year, but the trend is not downward. Overall, it’s clear that the city’s progress has been middling at best.
Too Little Detail on Bike Boulevards
A bike plan typically lays out recommendations on a street-by-street basis, suggesting different types of bikeways depending on the amount of space available on the street, as well as other constraints (typically parking).
In some cases, there will be enough space to build a protected bike lane or a multiuse path. In other cases, typically on neighborhood streets, there is not enough room for even a 5’ bike lane without removing on-street parking (often a political nonstarter). In cases like that, bike plans will often recommend a “bicycle boulevard,” which is a road where bicyclists do not have their own dedicated lane but where car traffic is slowed down sufficiently that riding a bicycle will feel safe for people of all ages and abilities.
Unfortunately, while this sounds good in theory, the “bike boulevard” recommendation can often be used as a cop-out. For example, of the dozen bike boulevard treatments recommended in the 2018 plan, none have been implemented. In multiple instances, an opportunity was missed to implement a bike boulevard when a road where one was recommended was repaved, such as on 1st St.
Part of this is due to a lack of specificity or design standard. Incredibly, the 2018 plan never even defined what bike boulevard was. The draft 2026 plan goes one tiny step further by defining it as, “a shared lane bikeway accompanied by traffic calming measures such as speed humps,” but provides no more guidance than that to staff. No mention is made about traffic and speed targets, nor is a suggestion given for other types of traffic calming that may be used.
We urge the DPW to refine the definition of a bicycle boulevard in such a way that they can actually be implemented following the passage of this plan.
Implementation with Repaving
While some projects require large capital expenditures (e.g. the proposed bridge over the San Rafael Canal or future extensions of the SMART pathway), others can be implemented more affordably, particularly if the construction is paired with a planned repaving of the street.
In particular, bike boulevards (described above) can typically be implemented alongside repaving with minimal additional costs, as speed humps and other traffic calming cost very little when crews are already mobilized to resurface a street. But even larger bikeway projects can be built alongside repaving, as the City of Oakland has been doing very effectively for several years, as long as design and coordination starts early enough in the process.
In prior years, MCBC has pointed out to city staff that a road slated for repaving had been recommended for upgrades in the 2018 plan, but we were told that there was no time or budget for public outreach. This, simply put, is a choice. By repaving a street without recommended bikeway improvements, the city is all but guaranteeing that they will not happen in the coming decade. No one wants to see their street torn up twice in 5 years – the city should take a “dig once” approach to bikeway for both practical and political reasons.
We urge the city to pass a policy requiring that projects recommended in the plan be implemented alongside regular repaving in order to save money and make faster progress.
How to Submit Comments
Click here to send an email to the Department of Public Works about the bike plan. Comments are due June 24, so don’t delay! You can read the full draft plan linked here.
Feel free to write your own comments, but here are the points we’re hoping you can join in supporting.
- Provide more complete report on what goals from the 2018 plan were achieved
- Create clear guidelines for bicycle boulevards, enabling their implementation
- Pass policy encouraging plan recommendations to implemented alongside of regular pavement rehabilitation
We thank you for your help and we look forward to seeing an improved final plan before the San Rafael City Council, likely sometime in July. To read our full comment letter to the city, click here.