Bottom-Up Shorts: How This California City Builds Bikeable Streets
Denyse Trepanier is the president of Bike Walk Alameda, a nonprofit organization in the island city of Alameda, California. She joins Norm to discuss the city's efforts to improve biking infrastructure, including the creation of a network of low-stress bikeways and neighborhood greenways.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Welcome to bottom up shorts. I'm Norm of strong towns, and after meeting 1000s of members, I often think I've got to tell you about this person, and that's what bottom up shorts is all about. Quick introductions to regular people doing exciting things. They're not superheroes. They once felt like you might unsure if they could make a difference, and today, my guest is Denise Trepanier, president of bike walk Alameda, and a board member since 2016 when she moved to Alameda after years of bike commuting in San Francisco, she recognized the need for continued investment in the types of things that make the community more safe, walkable, livable and inviting, and as a consequence, she's working within the city of Alameda with a lot of other people in order to bring forward their city as the one of the strongest town contestants for this year. And so it's exciting for this community to come together to really grapple with the question, what is it that makes us a stronger community, not a perfect one, far from it, but at the same time, one that is making demonstrable progress towards making a place great so that many people will enjoy prosperity within the community. And so I'm so glad that Denise shared this with us, and I'm excited to introduce her to you. Denise, do you want to share as someone who's lived and biked in both San Francisco and Alameda. What are some of the lessons that you feel like Alameda has learned well in its application of efforts to make the streets just more navigable for people, not just on foot, not just on a bicycle, but in various ways.
Denyse Trepanier 1:36
Thanks. Norm, yeah. Alameda is a great city. We are blessed, I would say, with topography and geography and climate that make us a really ideal place to bike. We're flat as a pancake. We don't have any highways in our city. We're a city of about 80,000 people, but we're lucky not to have any major highways, any federal highways, in our town, so we don't have to contend with a lot of that traffic. But being an island city, at least, most of Alameda is an island. Our egress is limited to bridges and tunnels, and so we have just a really nice topography and geography to make cycling very available. And I think one of the things that Alameda has done really well is focused on building a network of places to ride bikes. So instead of it just being, you know, necessarily, around the school or around the shopping center or around the park, the city has developed a bike plan and is actively working on implementing a connected network of low stress bikeways. They won't be all fully protected, but we have a lot of residential streets as well that we're converting into what we're calling neighborhood greenways, which will discourage through traffic and be open and pleasant for cars, and then that will connect most of our city and major spots together. It's probably going to take a few years for us to implement it. We're not looking at completing the low stress backbone until 2030 but it's really nice that the city has the vision, and we have the leadership on our council and in our staff, where we have a great staff that's working really hard on getting this stuff implemented, and
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 3:16
what changes physically on the street when it becomes part of the low stress sort of network and is sort of brought to an incrementally improved state.
Denyse Trepanier 3:25
Gotcha, yeah, it really depends on the type of road that we're starting with. So we have a lot of neighborhood, little neighborhood streets that you would sort of think of as in a neighborhood with driveways. Driveways can be a little contentious if you're trying to put in protection. So what we're trying to do is calm the traffic on those with speed bumps, daylighting, and so we're doing that on those residential streets, on our larger streets, on our collectors and our arterials. We actually have a lot of road diets going on. We have a major project starting on a major four lane road in Alameda that that runs to at least three or four schools, and that's getting a road diet and a protected cycle track on part of it, and then for another part, it's just getting some parking protected. But yeah, so we're building out it really depends on the type of facility that we're starting with will determine the type of treatments that the city's putting in place.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:26
And your group, together with a local PTA at the elementary school, were able to, in many ways, like, make the good visible, even before it became like officially permanent. Can you share a little bit about the bike lane Protection Program and its roots and why that has been fueling sort of more development of new opportunities to improve other places. Yeah, that's
Denyse Trepanier 4:48
been a really interesting project spearheaded by another board member, Maria Piper. She's the one who's led the effort, and she has the hands on keyboard, feet on ground. She's done all the work for that, so I want to give her credit. Where to do. But essentially, she has a child that she was bringing by bike to Bay Farm Elementary every day, and she just recognized that there was a painted bike lane there, and it was, it was just it had become a drop off zone. So it was extremely unused, or being used incorrectly. And so she took upon herself to basically start a process where she went out there every morning and put out a bunch of cones to keep the bike lane safe, and she kept kind of hounding staff about it. And then, as part of their annual paving program, they were going to be doing that road, and she's got them to put in some flex post. We'd like concrete, but she's getting flex post at least, so she doesn't have to go out there every morning with the with to drag the the cones out. So it was, I think it's a great example of how much you can get done by just kind of doing the work, like just showing up and doing the work. And it doesn't even have to be that much. This was a big project that she took on, of course, but she basically showcased what could be available if we kept cars out of this space and got staff to recognize that, yeah, that should be a priority. It was on a plan for 2030 or to happen sometime before 2030 and she got it pushed all the way up by by doing this work so
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 6:20
and an element of it was that people can visualize what it is that is needed. And I think we were just chatting before we started recording on people's challenge of grappling with something that is hypothetical or in the future versus those things that you actually get to experience. And oftentimes, you know, the housing that is still to come in a community is the thing that people fear, but the housing that already exists is the thing that they don't bat an eye about often, to the point where you'll have people that have been vociferous opponents of particular housing projects that later, maybe a little bit sheepishly, like move into those very same neighborhoods. And I think that this is one of the challenges where, as Alameda grapples with what it takes to build local prosperity that really radiates through everyone's or to everyone's benefit. Can you share a little bit about some of those features of your community that make it a really strong and strengthening place? Yeah? Yeah.
Denyse Trepanier 7:11
Definitely. Like I said, we're blessed from a physical standpoint. We also have an interesting history. The island itself of Alameda, for your listeners who don't know, is a city Island in San Francisco Bay. We're just offshore of Oakland, so we're pretty we're pretty close to San Francisco, a 20 minute ferry ride to San Francisco, so we're very much an inner ring suburb, but we were also Naval Air Station after World War Two, so a good third of our island is an abandoned Naval Air Station. So even though we're in this amazing, prosperous area, and we have all these these blessings, there's a huge portion of our land that is undeveloped. And so the city is going through a process right now of redeveloping that we've opened up the first phase of housing, but it's all planned to be redeveloped over the next eight, nine years. And so the city's building, rebuilding roads and infrastructure out there. And as they're doing that, they're putting in all this sort of best in class, if you will, although I would say there's still room for improvement, Best of Class roads. So we've got, I don't know, eight or nine protected intersections, now fully protected intersections, because we get to sort of start over over there with building it all, which is a really nice thing. And we've, like I said, we've got very forward thinking for the most part, staff and electeds, and they just want to do the right thing. And so it's kind of happening. Like I said, The reconfiguration of our existing roads is a little trickier because you have the conversations around parking and, you know, car throughput and prioritization at Signal phases, blah, blah, blah, but in the new area, where no one lives yet, there's kind of a blank canvas to do the right thing, which is really nice. Yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:05
speaking of I mean, because your community is not a blank canvas as as through its history, and also through sort of the web of relationships. Can you describe just briefly, one of the components of a strong community is having a lot of active, engaged citizens. And can you share, maybe not only bike walk Alameda share a little bit about that, but also maybe some of the other groups that you regularly can sort of lift up and work with together in your community? Yeah,
Denyse Trepanier 9:31
yeah. As I mentioned before, we started recording, we went through a pretty contentious housing fight recently, when we were approving our general plan, part of the we had to get our mobility and, sorry, not our housing element, component of our general plan approved, and it has to be approved by the state to show that we're planning for sufficient housing or housing allocation at that point. I mean, it dawned on me as a Transportation Act. Advocate just how closely the housing and transportation issues are intertwined. They're really, I don't even want to say they're two sides of the same or two different sides of the same coin. I think they're the same thing. And so at that point, we worked really closely with some of the MB organizations in town to move the general plan forward, and the general plan had both a mobility element and a housing element, and so together, we had a much stronger voice advocating for our own and each other's views of what should be included in that plan. We have Alameda has a very engaged citizenry. There's very few boards or commissions where we don't have a lot of public comment, so they're very active. It's an older town. It's kind of there's a bit of a dichotomy. There's a lot of old retired people. There's a lot of old military people here, because we used to be a Naval Air Station. So there's a little bit of a component of people who want to preserve Alameda and Amber and never have anything change, but we're an inner ring suburb of San Francisco, so that's not going to happen. And so to what we need to do is plan for it thoughtfully and make sure it the plans that we're putting in place match the vision that we all want. Fortunately, we also have a lot of fairly progressive people coming in from San Francisco on a regular basis, and so that counteracts or counterbalances some of the more old guard, if you will, that want to keep it nothing changing in Alameda. So but yeah, it's, it's, it's a good conversation to have. You get an opportunity to educate a lot of people on a lot of different issues. Yeah, and your your resources have been tremendous for that. So thank you for all the work that you do in providing the resources to us locals to educate the people we're advocating with. Yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:55
thank you appreciate that. And I know that I've done a number of presentations just even personally, but also strong towns has for different bike walk groups across the country. And it's really exciting to know that there is, sort of, like you said, that close connection between the way that we make land use decisions, transportation decisions and housing decisions, and really beginning to grapple with that longer term impact of taking steps to make places more expensive and exclusive actually comes at the cost of the long term prosperity of the community. And so as you sort of reflect on where you're at, and your community is now in the round of 16 for the strongest town contest, and voting is underway, and like you said, you're up against Bend Oregon, which is also a great community. And so providing some stiff competition, what is it that gives you hope, sort of not just today, but maybe going forward in your community,
Denyse Trepanier 12:44
yeah. I mean, in my community, I feel like there's just so many good things happening. We the plans I've been talking about were put together, you know, during COVID 2021, so now we're starting to see the fruits of the labor. And, you know, for the last couple years, it's been a little discouraging, because these plans tend to get delayed. And now there's funding issues, blah, blah, blah, but now, as my advocacy partner in crime, Cindy, says she's seeing cones and dozers on the street. And so it's starting to happen. It's starting to materialize. We also had a really positive election where we got one of our bigger obstructionists off the council, and so, you know, we're just getting stuff done now and getting stuff passed. So, yeah, it's mostly that, at least at the local level. Again, I'm not looking at anything outside local I feel like we have the hearts and minds of the community now. We have the staff, and we have a lot of the elected officials, and I think those are the three legs of the three legged stool that you you need to have in order to get stuff done funding as well. But from a people standpoint, I think we've got in place what we need, and that that gives me a lot of
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:56
hope. Yeah, well, Denise, this has been wonderful, and as we wrap up, I just love hearing how the work that you're doing is making real change in your community. Again, it's one step, it's one project, but even perhaps even before, that is one conversation at a time. And so if this inspired you, I hope you'll look for ways to take action where you live. Change, as we know, doesn't start at the top. It starts with people just like you. And so thanks for listening and take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Bike Walk Alameda (site)
Alameda made it to the Sweet 16 in this year’s Strongest Town Contest, from a list of almost 40 nominees. There are many great lessons that cities of all sizes can learn from their hard work. Click here to read more about their progress.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn)
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