# Road design for people, not just cars



## ukbloke (Sep 1, 2007)

There's an interesting, and positive, story on the Merc about local city streets being redesigned for people use, rather than just optimized for cars. Santa Clara did exactly this to the main road near me, and the new layout is hugely improved for cyclists and pedestrians.


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## robwh9 (Sep 2, 2004)

They did that to Evelyn Ave in Sunnyvale. They also put sensors in the bike lanes so bicycles will trigger the stop lights. Plus bike bridges over 101 and 237. Way to go Sunnyvale!


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## ratpick (Jul 31, 2008)

There have been a few of these up this way too - makes a huge difference. So great to see Bay Area cities embracing non-car transport. Road layouts are really the major disincentive to bicycle commuting around here.


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## MerlinAma (Oct 11, 2005)

Here's a link to an interesting article.

http://bikeportland.org/2011/07/26/...ider-alternative-transportation-systems-56851

Looks like the USA will eventually go to a European model of transportation as the highway system we have "enjoyed" for the past 30 years or so cannot be supported economically.

That's going to be real hard for people to accept which is why it'll take decades of pain for the conversion to occur.


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## Dr_John (Oct 11, 2005)

A timely article worth a peak:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/28/BAQE1KFOEF.DTL

Bike traffic up 58% from 2006 to 2010.

I can't believe what's been done along McDonnell (basically the SFO frontage road). First "sharrows" were painted, which was a nice gesture, but they were removed and I didn't know why. They've recently resurfaced all of South McDonnell (look for plenty of new PRs on Strava where this is part of a segment), and now there are nice, new bike lanes in both directions on South and North McDonell. Very nice. :thumbsup:


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