The choices before the Fullerton City Council. Which one provides the safest route for bicycles?

Matthew Leslie

With a four-to-one vote, Jesus Silva dissenting, four members of the Fullerton City Council sold out Fullerton’s Bicycle Master Plan in order to allow what is effectively illegal overnight parking on a street near a recently built housing development in Amerige Heights. Ignoring unanimous decisions by both the Bicycle Users Subcommittee (BUSC) and the Transportation and Circulation Commission (TCC) to proceed with a planned Class II bike lane along Hughes Drive between Bastanchury Road and Nicolas Street, the City Council instead decided to force cyclists to share the road with automative traffic on a two lane street so they wouldn’t anger the residents of an adjacent housing project who use the public street for overflow parking.

Class II bike lanes provide a separate lane for riders, demarcated by thick white lines and clearly printed words designating them as such, next to vehicular traffic lanes, providing at least theoretical protection for riders. Class III bikeways are simply signed routes on roads, without a striped lane. The ultimate goal of the plan is to provide a safe bike route between Gilbert Street and Bastanchury Road.

The segment of Hughes Drive originally slated for a Class II bike lane.

Hughes Drive seems to have been a four lane street at some point, but is currently considered to be a two lane street with a center left turn lane to accommodate workers entering the Raytheon facility on the north side of the street. Don Hoppe, the city’s Director of Public Works, said that there was inadequate space for both a bike lane and the street’s center lane, and the existing parking. On the south side, residents of the tightly packed houses just over the sidewalk enjoy the benefit of parking their cars on the public street, often overnight, even though parking between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m. on any Fullerton street that doesn’t enjoy an exemption from the city’s overnight parking rule is against the law.

A close up view of Hughes Drive, where residents have the convenience of a public street to park their cars overnight, because four spaces per house is somehow not enough parking.

Residents complained that they hadn’t enough parking for guests, even though each unit has a two car garage and a driveway to accommodate an additional two cars. Councilmember Silva argued for adding the Class II bike lane, as planned, noting the existence of about forty parking spaces right around the corner on Nicolas Street.

Easy parking  on Nicolas Street, just around the corner, but not close enough for residents.

Sounding for all the world like recalled Councilmember and Mayor Dick Jones, Mayor Pro Tem Doug Chaffee launched into a reminiscence of riding his bicycle in India as a Peace Corps volunteer. He argued that bicycle riders and automobile drivers should be able to share a road in Fullerton if he was able to dodge cars, cow pies, pedestrians, and water buffalo on his bike oh so many years ago half a world away. Ignoring the fact that water buffalo don’t move at twenty five miles per hour, the speed limit on Hughes Drive, Mr. Chaffee evidently thought that lowering the bar on traffic safety to the standards of India in the 1960’s was appropriate for Fullerton in 2017.*

Doug Chaffee: had to dodge a water buffalo in India fifty years ago, so you shouldn’t have a safe lane for your bike.

Mr. Chaffee then characterized the conflict between the needs of cyclists to ride safely with the desperation of nearby residents to preserve their free overflow/overnight parking by calling it a case of “the ivory tower versus boots on the ground.” In his opinion, the plan for the bike lane was approved by people in an ivory tower, somehow removed from” the reality,” even though the BUSC is populated by actual cyclists who actually ride the streets of Fullerton and know from experience what they are talking about. “Boots on the ground,” in his mind, are “all the houses that came later,” as if whole housing tracts appeared out of thin air without city approvals of plans for neighborhoods with inadequate parking, if one chooses to side with the residents, who somehow need more than four parking spaces per house.

Most shocking was the treatment given Transportation and Circulation Commission Chair Elizabeth Hansberg, who rightly observed that overnight parking was a city-wide issue that needed to be dealt with in a consistent manner all over Fullerton. She was promptly shut down by Councilmember Jennifer Fitzgerald, joined by Bruce Whitaker, who insisted that overnight parking was a separate agenda item later in the meeting, even though it was obviously germane to the Hughes Drive bike lane decision too, since the Amerige Heights residents themselves said there were cars (their own, evidently) parked on Hughes “day and night.”

Ultimately, the council chose to downgrade the Class II bike lane to a Class III bike route with sharrows, forcing bikes and cars to share the road, which can work well, but should not be adopted where there is room for a Class II instead. Remember, the speed limit on Hughes Drive is 25 mph, and most cyclists do not ride that fast (!). Cars will now be restricted to whatever speed a cyclist feels like riding.

At least Bruce Whitaker recognized the that developers weren’t providing enough parking, but he characterized the existing parking as “overflow,” ignoring the fact that residents also routinely use Hughes as their own private overnight parking lot. Either way, his acknowledgement that parking was a problem didn’t keep him from making the wrong decision about the cycling lane, even though he took the time to confirm with Public Works Director Hoppe that the Hughes Drive street segment in question was, in fact, part of the larger bike plan, and shouldn’t be considered in “isolation.” Which is worse, making a bad decision out of ignorance, or knowing full well the consequences of it, and doing it anyway?

Mayor Bruce Whitaker: recognizing the problem of inadequate parking, and making the wrong decision anyway.

Some public speakers observed that they didn’t see many cyclists using Hughes Drive, but they miss the point, as the council did, that if the city creates safe conditions for cyclists, people will ride their bikes instead of driving cars. The council’s decision, Mr. Silva excepted, was a 100% retrograde one in terms of encouraging alternative transportation in Fullerton. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Removing a safe bicycle lane from the city’s bike master plan creates a gap that affects the ability of cyclists to safely commute across the city. Doing it to privilege parking for cars not only encourages residents to rely on automobiles, but also rewards developers for providing inadequate parking for neighborhoods.

*At press time, the city’s video of the meeting has been uploaded, but the video mysteriously, and maddeningly, starts just after Doug Chaffee’s water buffalo story, cutting out the staff presentation and all of the public speakers. UPDATE: The full recording of the meeting now appears in the city’s website (August 15, 2017, 7:00 p.m.)