Improving Active Transportation Around Simi Valley Schools
Like clockwork, twice every weekday, the streets of Simi Valley become saturated with the cars of the tens of thousands of people who commute to work and school. Parents sit waiting in their idling cars for their turn to drop off their children, and wish them a good day. Unfortunately this way of life is generally accepted by most Southern California residents. However, Simi Valley should be able to do better. A significant number of students live just a 10-20 minute bike ride away from school, yet continue to be shuttled around by family or neighbors as biking this short distance to school can often seem stressful or dangerous. If we want to reduce the congestion on our roads, improve the quality of our air and allow our students to be more independent, we urgently need to improve the safety and experience of our biking infrastructure.
Below is a heatmap illustrating the time it takes to walk from one of the three high schools in Simi to the surrounding neighborhoods. Dark blue represents a trip of <5 min where the dark red represents a trip of around 25 to 30 min.
If we adjust this heatmap to instead show the same ranges but for a bicycle trip instead of walking, we can significantly increase the percentage of students and staff that can access school without the help of a personal automobile.
Even though these trips seem attainable by time alone, a multitude of other, invisible obstacles hidden in our infrastructure prevent students and other riders from cycling to school each day. These maps were generated by close.city.
The Challenge
How do we encourage more people to bike to school? Well, how do we encourage more people to bike at all? Most of Simi Valley’s bike infrastructure induces stress in the people that use it. Only the most fit and adventurous people will even consider riding their bike in the painted gutter on the side of the road. There are usually dangerously fast-moving cars zooming by over the speed limit or not paying attention to their surroundings.
that’s a bike lane on the right of Los Angeles Ave. A thoroughfare with a speed limit set at 45MPH.
If you’ve ever had the displeasure of using one of these lanes, it’s truly terrifying having a large truck or SUV barrel past you far above the speed limit.
A possible solution
The easiest thing we can do to improve this experience is update the city’s definition and standard of class II bike paths. The current standard defined in the 2008 edition of the Master Bike Plan has some flaws that make it unfriendly to younger and less experienced cyclists.
Let’s pick out some of the flaws with this layout
- Bikes are located adjacent to traffic, directly exposing them to fast-moving traffic.
- Bikes are positioned in the “door zone” where the driver’s side doors can open suddenly and possibly strike a biker.
These problems can be resolved by swapping the parking spots and the bike lanes. Riding a bike is significantly more comfortable in this style of Class 2 bike lane. Here is an example from the city of Santa Monica on how they aim to convert their old streets to have parking buffered bike lanes and also retain the parking element. This layout closely resembles some of the streets we have here in Simi Valley, like the east portion of Royal Ave.
These modifications can be made cheaply and occur during routine re-striping. If the striping proves popular, the treatment can be made more permanent with concrete or flex posts to create an even more comfortable experience. Here is an example of plans like this put into practice.
We can also start biking programs in coordination with our schools to educate students about biking, like the City of Ventura when they partnered with BikeVentura to offer bimonthly bicycle education classes for students.
Another potential solution
While the first solution proposed isolating bicycle traffic from vehicular traffic, this solution seeks to slow down vehicular traffic. Making the driving experience more uncomfortable has proven to reduce speeds and make the pedestrian experience more comfortable. This can be down by narrowing lanes, adding in trees to the planters on the side of the road, or potentially even adding a middle divider with plants.
The city could even opt to use “modal filters”, a technique used to restrict through traffic on neighborhood streets. They are usually just bollards, parks or even rocks that ensure that neighborhood streets are only used by residents and not people making longer trips attempting to avoid the main roads and potential traffic. They create a more welcoming pedestrian experience and ensure neighborhoods stay quieter.
An opportunity for positive change
The upcoming refresh to the Simi Valley Bicycle Master Plan presents the perfect opportunity for the city to accomplish these goals. Since our plan hasn’t been updated since 2008, it’s critical that we take action now to include good, future-proof planning that we can rely on throughout the next decade to guide our active transportation planning.
Incorporating changes into our plan that directly increase the chances of getting students to bike to school is a critical step to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT); remove harmful local pollutants from our air, promoting a healthier lifestyle for our community and children; along with letting our kids reclaim independence they lose by having to be shuttled around by their parents all day.