El Camino Real event highlights bus improvements, bike lanes, affordable housing

On May 11th, Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) hosted a bike ride and poster session on El Camino Real to highlight bike lanes, pedestrian improvements, transit speed, and affordable housing projects and plans in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.

The poster session showed only a fraction of the many transportation improvements, homes and mixed use developments along El Camino, which is evolving according to a vision created nearly two decades ago to transform an auto-oriented corridor with more sustainable, multi-modal transportation and with walkable, mixed use development.

Many cities along the corridor are making safety improvements in tandem with the California Department of Transportation’s scheduled repaving of the El Camino Real corridor. This important North/South route, which runs through San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, is a high collision area which has injured and killed hundreds of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The event started with a bike ride along the corridor, beginning at the Santa Clara Caltrain station and ending at the Palo Alto Caltrain Station. At the end of the bike ride Seamless Bay Area joined our SVBC friends for a poster session to highlight the safety, transit priority, and affordable housing projects springing up along El Camino Real.

Dozens of people perused the poster session at the end of the ride, taking in the broad set of changes up and down the corridor. SVBC has a multi-year campaign advocating for safety improvements, and land use changes have been occurring gradually - very few have a full perspective of the magnitude of changes gradually unfolding.

About a decade ago, Santa Clara County returned money to the federal government after cities rejected a comprehensive plan for bus rapid transit on ECR. Since then, VTA and SamTrans have been taking more incremental approaches to speeding up buses on this major transit corridor.

Many thanks to Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition for supporting this education.

Below are some of the posters we presented at the event.