All right, good morning everyone.

I'd like to call to order how we need to count supervisors transportation committee.

Meeting of Monday.

It's called well, established quorum.

Supervisor Miley.

Supervisor Howard.

We have a quorum.

Thank you very much.

The first item is an action item, a discussion, consideration of Castro Valley MAX recommendation.

Castor Valley Boulevards class two bike lane evaluation and bicycle utilization study.

Mr.

Will Dessenberg, the floor is yours.

Good morning, thank you, Daniel Old Desmond Public Post Director.

This item was heard by your uh committee a couple of months ago.

Uh at the time we did receive a clear direction that uh you committee uh understands the action taken and was in line with keeping the bike lane along Castro Valley Boulevard.

Uh however, on January 20th, 2026, uh we presented uh to the Castro Valley Mac the item again, and uh the committee discussed, heard from various uh individuals, and uh recommended that we bring this item back to the TMP uh so that uh public works can be directed to work with area businesses to identify parking needs and to modify existing signing and striping to support shared use of parking and bike lanes uh and then uh requested that the staff brings this back to the MAC within six months.

Just to give you a background, uh it's in the report, but uh we uh Castro Valley Boulevard is designated as a class two uh bike facility uh under the master plan the 2019 master plan.

Uh you know the master plan was done through extensive community process.

Uh, took a long time to put together, has been to the Castro Valley Mac a couple of times before it was adapted, and uh and uh it's established the actions that public works will take in terms of installation of sidewalks and bike in general active transportation facilities, and that's what uh public rest followed.

Uh we evaluated, however, uh as any uh action that we take uh what the appropriate strategy would be uh to implement uh the bike lane.

We looked at available parking spaces, we looked at uh parking restrictions that need to be adapted due to uh you know side distance issues, uh fire hydrants, bus stops, all those things were done.

Most importantly, we looked at what are what is the available off-street parking in that area, and and based on that, we made a decision that the appropriate action to take would be to install a class two bike lane with buffer along the corridor because one it connects two board stations.

It's a very much uh consistent with the uh the board's uh action when you adapted the 2019 facility that's connectivity, safety, uh, and and uh active transportation system was one of your uh uh decisions uh in adapting those those policies.

So uh we basically did this.

We installed the bike lanes, uh, and we removed approximately I would say uh 12 on street parking on the north side uh and then 23 spaces on the south side along about a half a mile stretch of Castro Valley Boulevard.

Castro Valley Boulevard has about 21,000 cars a day uh typically uh based on a count that was done a few years back.

So as a standard practice, we usually also evaluate uh whether it's counting cars or bikes and various things to see what happens post implementation of a project.

So we did a bicycle utilization uh study along that corridor.

We implemented uh a bike counting system where we put in about eight locations, uh, those tubes that that you see usually on cars, but this one is for bikes, uh, and counted uh how many bikes were being using, and it was done over about a two-week period.

And the study found we have on a typical day ranging at these various locations, 22 to 51 bikes a day, that were utilizing that location.

In fact, the highest maximum is as high as 89 bicycles using it per day.

So the results are summarized in attachment uh uh B, and it tells you, you know, at each location what the numbers were.

And so most importantly, I think what we learned was that there is a modest ridership, but continuously consistent ridership along the corridor.

And experience tells us whenever we install something, similar facilities that are, you know, as long as you provide that safety and continuity, this kind of infrastructure will often see increase in use as people become more aware and uh the comfort of riders become more and more uh therefore they will be using this system.

So we expect that uh utilization will increase.

But the most important thing is now we have a baseline, a starting point to compare uh these numbers.

So uh we understand, and I think uh apparent in the community discussions uh whenever you utilize parking space, I mean uh public ride away for various uses, there's certain conflicting interests.

Uh in this case, some people thought parking was more important than the bike lane, and others thought bike lanes were more important than others.

Uh so because we went through these various uh studies and evaluations and looking at what is uh safe, what is appropriate, that uh we felt, uh at least public works recommends uh that we need to continue evaluating these corridor uh with continuous data.

I would like to actually verbatim read what public was recommended.

The last page of the report has the public cost recommendation.

Uh so I would say the corridor continues to operate with a new bike lane configuration.

Public works recommends ongoing monitoring of bicycle volumes, safety performance, and overall corridor operations, including access to adjacent properties.

The public works agency does not have a role or funding authority to evaluate or manage parking for individual or businesses.

Parking supply and demand on private property are responsibilities of property owners.

Accordingly, business owners may consider strategies to increase parking availability, such as restriping existing off-street parking to improve efficiency or explore share parking arrangements.

They may also consider measures to reduce parking demand, including promoting carpooling and ride sharing.

The bicycle utilization study indicates that the class two bike lane is used consistently throughout the day with no identifiable uh peak hour concentration of bicycle activities.

As a result, piecemeal or time of a day modification, including peak hour conversation conversions of on-street parking are not supported by the data and could increase the safety risk to bicycle users.

More importantly, uh the let me see, and not support by the data.

Incidents, you know, this is very important for the committee to understand anything that any decision we make, any incident occurring after any kind of arbitrary changes could present a significant liability to the county.

Uh so we need to be very careful as to how uh the decisions are actually advanced.

For these reasons, uh public works advises against partial or incremental alterations uh that would undermine the safety benefits of the existing design.

Any future modification should bring should preserve the safety benefits of the bike lane while thoughtfully balancing the need of residents, businesses, and visitors, ensuring that the corridor remains safe, accessible, and functional for all users.

That's our that's our recommendation.

Uh, the MAC uh at least would like to see if we can uh modify uh the by kind of allowing parking in some areas and not allowing in some areas.

I think that's that's too risky and too dangerous for uh uh for the bikers, and I would I would we would uh strongly uh recommend that we should not uh we should not do that.

So any questions I'd be happy to answer.

Supervisor Marley, any questions before we go to public comment?

Yes, thank you um I appreciate the work that public works has done on this um and obviously we're trying to balance uh the needs of a lot of different uh users of the street um and then also balance um policies associated with um congestion and uh the enhancement of uh commercial business activity uh dealing with greenhouse gases um the use of um alternative modes of transportation there's a lot that's going into the the mix here um I do respect the fact that uh believe Paul Keener before he passed away uh with our um pastor plan uh the public works uh worked on this a lot of respect for the work that Paul did um so and I do appreciate the fact that Public Works has done some analysis since um making the change what I'm trying to ascertain is I believe in Dublin they do this and maybe uh Supervisor Halbert might be aware of it since he lives in Dublin and was mayor of Dublin and on the Dublin City Council I think uh there are bike lanes on certain streets but then certain hours of the day um parking is allowed I don't know if if that is something that's uh contemplated as an option so we keep the bike lanes but we allow for parking at certain times of the day um for instance uh in non-commute uh hours for instance it was has that been uh explored or considered so that's why I'll say the data shows the bike lane utilization is there's no peak hour there's no concentration so uh that's why we need to continue to evaluate it if there is a certain pattern that emerges there's a certain bike lane utilization hours any concentration that's something that we can look at uh in the future but at this time you have a fairly random utilization of the bike lane so uh there's no way of saying during certain time we should have this and as you can see from the uh the uh the drawing that for example the area where uh we have this new restaurant large scale restaurant and event center has over 340 parking spaces off site so whether we remove five or six or nine spaces on street will have very little to no impact on the way that parking uh is being utilized that's why I think that business for example has an opportunity to reevaluate can they restrict can they rearrange their parking spaces so that they can increase the utilization so uh at this time I think uh we strongly recommend that since we do not have any patterns putting a bike lane at certain time and then eliminating that bike lane at certain time is more of a risk than uh the value add that you get from increased parking uh so uh as we move forward and as data become more available as we see what's going on throughout the years maybe we can come up with a solution that matches up what the data tells us at this time the data does not support any kind of pick our modification of the bike lane yeah but intuitively just seems to me that having parking like from I don't know 11 to 3.