South Pasadena Approves Protected Bike Lane for Entirety of Fremont Ave.
South Pasadena has now approved design concepts for both of its forthcoming Complete Streets projects: first Huntington Drive, and now Fremont Avenue.
City council unanimously approved Concept 2A on Wednesday, which calls for removing the northbound parking lane on Fremont, replacing it with a protected two-way cycle track, and keeping a center turn lane in all but the northmost segment of the street.
When council approved Huntington’s design last month, there was some concern on the dais about how residents of different sections of Fremont would cope with removed street parking. 97 of 258 spaces will be taken away, and 57 trees and 32 palms will have to be replanted.
However, when staff and consultants returned this week with an alternative concept, they only recommended that the council consider switching to Concept 5 (a mixed-use path, see above) for segment 3 of Fremont (see below). For the rest of Fremont, they recommended staying with Concept 2A.
It’s no small difference: Concept 2A removes 36 spaces from segment 3, Concept 5 would have added 2. Though it did not rule the night, there were public concerns about it.
Fremont resident Oliver McIrwin told the council, “The decision made by the committee today could completely remove the parking that we and our neighbors utilize daily for things like transport of my elderly parents, who have handicap needs.”
“I’m in contact with planning, and we met with [Public] Works today to see if it might be possible for us to put in a driveway, which isn’t something that we really want to do, but if all the parking is removed, we have to think of a way to preserve access,” McIrwin said.
Katie Bird, who resides specifically on segment 3, was supportive of the project overall, but seemed concerned about renters losing street parking.
“It is a really busy area for parking,” Bird said. “It may not seem like it at night, sometimes it’s very quiet, but if there’s ever an event at the school or churches, it can be tricky to find parking. I do live on the east side of the street, so parking would be impacted.”
Casey Law, a member of the advocacy group South Pas Active, suggested a novel solution that could alleviate the problem at least near South Pasadena High School.
“The district has a massive lot right in the middle of this highly utilized parking space along the center of segment three. If we had an agreement for use overnight, it may relieve a lot of demand for parking in this area,” Law said.
But much more so than parking, public comment returned repeatedly to the risks of having piecemeal protected bike lanes and shared bike/walk paths.
Frequent commenter and project supporter Diego Zavala got straight to the heart of the issue.
“The primary users of this bike lane are obviously going to be the youth,” Zavala said, referring to the town’s popular bike bus, “and the trouble with this is that sometimes the youth play by their own rules. So I could just imagine somebody walking in the multi-use lane, maybe somebody who’s elderly, who is having difficulty with mobility, and they have somebody fly right by them. It puts them at risk, and I can just imagine them feeling like, ‘Hey, this was supposed to be a project that was supposed to make me feel more safe, more comfortable, and I feel like this is not serving me.’”
Wes Reutimann, deputy director of the mobility non-profit Active SGV, added a finer point to it.
“If you have a slope at all, you’re increasing the speed differential between people walking and people biking, or people using electric scooters,” Reutimann said.
Law added that e-bikes on a shared-use path could be a lawsuit waiting to happen for the city.
“Class Three [e-]bikes – which can ride up to about 28 miles per hour – may be technically forbidden by state law on this shared path,” Law said. This is generally true, unless specifically authorized.
Though the council remained concerned about loss of on-street parking (Mayor Sheila Rossi suggested permit only parking on some side streets), they were all in agreement that using Concept 2A as a unified design for all of Fremont was the way to go, and they voted unanimously to approve it.
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