NYC’s not the only major city making headway. On Thursday, November 17, San Jose, California’s City Council will meet to (hopefully) adopt its new Bicycle Plan.
The plan would reverse decades of traffic engineering focused almost exclusively on the automobile and shift priorities to bicycles, pedestrians and public transit. The plan includes policy objectives to double the number of on-street lanes from 250 to 500 miles, add 5,000 new bike racks and bring bicycle mode share to 5% in an effort to achieve League of American Bicyclists’ Gold level bike friendly status. And they want to do all this by 2020.
SF.Streetsblog.org reports that San Jose has tripled bicycle mode share in the past three years to 1.2 percent, putting the city 15th among the 70 largest U.S. cities (SJDOT statistic).
According to Cyclelicio.us (which is based around San Jose), that translates into 11,000+ cyclists riding to work, and it represents a 206% increase of bicycle commuters from 2005 to 2008.
