The Walnut Creek City Council convened on September 2, 2025, for a meeting that included a study session on draft recommendations for a curb management plan. The regular session covered routine approvals, public comments on e-bike safety and parking, several public hearings, and council reports. Key discussions focused on improving downtown parking and mobility, streamlining development services, and amending community development block grant allocations.
Thank you. City Clerk Susie Martinez, please call the role. I'm reading on the right script. Councilmember DeVini. Is here. He just stepped out for the moment. Councilmember Francois. Here. Councilmember Silva. Mayor Pro Temwell. Mayor Darling. Here. All right. Next on the agenda is public communications. And under California law, public comments at special meetings are limited to subjects on the agenda only. Therefore, public comments will be received during the city council consideration of the item. So next on the agenda is a study session on consideration and direction on draft recommendations from the curb management program or plan. It's a plan, not a program. And I'd invite the staff come up and start the presentation. So thank you, Council members. My name is Brianna Byrne, and I'm an associate traffic engineer here at the city of Walnut Creek. This afternoon, early evening, I'm going to be discussing the curbside management plan and the draft recommendations. Again, emphasis on draft. We are here to solicit feedback from our council members. In the audience with me today, this was a very large effort. So we have two consultants on our team from Fair and Pears, Terrence Dow and May Commitment. And then multiple staff from multiple departments. So as we get into any type of questions around the recommendations or friction points, they will be here to support. So a discussion overview for this afternoon for this presentation. What is curb management? And then go into the goal setting for this plan in our downtown. We'll review regional as well as local existing policies and goals, the parking study that we had done as part of this effort, and then our outreach findings and what we heard from our stakeholders. This will tie into the recommendations and then go into our implementation strategy. Following up with timeline and next steps. So curb space, what is it? As a city's asset, curb space, it's where we can see people park, but it's also a bus stop, it could be a loading zone. Think of the yellow curb, it could be bike lanes, it could be curb extensions, it could be parklets, outdoor dining. So managing that curb space is called curb management. And it's about organizing these uses along the curb based on transportation best practices, but also community goals. What does downtown want to see for Walnut Creek? And then the management, it seeks to balance among all road users. So the goal setting for downtown, as we went into this plan, this was our goal. The plan would set data driven standards to optimize the curb by balancing parking, loading, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, placemaking, accessibility, and safety, while considering the needs of people of all ages, abilities, and economic backgrounds. As we started the process to solidify these goals specific for Walnut Creek, we again we looked at our adopted plans and policies, stakeholder input and our data collection. Looking at regional first, there's the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. So we're doing this. In part, the city received a little less than 200,000 in grant funds from MTC, Metropolitan Transportation Commission to prepare this plan. MTC has a transit-oriented communities, a TOC policy, and this aims to improve connections and access to transit in the region. So MTC, they created this grant to help agencies support TOC Action 5. Implement complementary parking management policies.